220
LIONEL ABEL
and execute was not the Laval of 1946, but the Laval of 1940 to
1945, the Laval who had enjoyed influence and power, who had
been a partner, though a junior one,
in
Hitler's enterprises. The
impossibility of real justice, Simone de Beauvoir pointed out,
is
always that the criminal on the dock can never be the same person
that he was when he committed his crimes. Would that he could
be punished when glorying in his deeds, with his guilt full-blown upon
him! But he can only be tried when he is caught and already de–
feated. And it is only then that you can punish him. The man you
really wanted to punish has, in a way, escaped.
No doubt Miss Arendt is aware of this penetrating and right
analysis of the difficulty of retributive justice made by Simone de
Beauvoir. Certainly it is one of the best things in existentialist literature,
which I am sure Miss Arendt knows at least as well as I do.
Yet she projects the Eichmann on trial for his life back into
the past when he was in charge of the extermination of some
four-and-a-half to six million Jews, as if the two Eichmanns, the one
pleading not to be executed and the one invested with the power to
execute so many others were exactly the same person. There is no
other Eichmann for her besides the one she saw in the prisoner's
dock, unless perhaps the Eichmann who, early in
his
career as a
Nazi had been instructed by his superiors to read Herzl's
Judenstaat,
and "had been converted ... immediately and forever to Zionism."
Now Miss Arendt's effort to present Eichmann as a convinced
adherent of the Zionist ideology is, as Marie Syrkin has shown in
the article I have already referred to/ completely unconvinc-
2. Miss Arendt gives two arguments for Eichmann's Zionism: (1) that he was
in favor at one time during the war of resettling the Jews of Europe in some
part of Europe, and (2) that he had dealings during the war with Zionisu,
whom he allowed to circulate freely in Nazi-dominated territoIJY. Syrkin
has destroyed these arguments "In the pre-extermination stage (what
Miss Arendt describes as the
'Zioni~t'
stage), the Nazi high command,
among
them Eichmann, debated the possibility of concentrating expelled Jews in some
region of Eastern Europe instead of killing them outright: they would perish
more slowly and work for the Nazis in the meantime." Miss Syrkin's com.
ment on why Miss Arendt should identify the resettlement scheme cited
above with "Zionism" seems to me perfectly justified. ". . . but the . . .
parallel between Eichman's 'dream' of a Devil's Island and Herzl's vision
of
a Jewish state, of the Nazis' expulsion and concentrations of their captivea
