84
MARY McCARTHY
evidence on behalf of this idea. He can defend it,
if
he wishes, as his
personal impression. But this is more of a judgment of Abel than of
Miss Arendt: reading her book, he liked Eichmann better than the
Jews who died
in
the crematoriums. Each to his own taste. It was not
my impression.
But since Abel is not the only one to insist that Eichmann somehow
got preferential treatment, he must be answered, if only as a spokesman
for those less well read and less intellectually gifted than he. It is
hardly credible to me that any reader, no matter how stupid, could
really imagine that Miss Arendt divides the guilt equally between Eicb–
mann and the Jews, let alone that she regards Eichmann as a lovely
object in contrast to the Jewish dead. And yet this has happened, and
it must be understood.
Before writing this, I have gone back and reread
Eichmann in
Jerusalem
as objectively as I can. My original feeling was that the part
allotted to the Jewish leadership was quite small in the whole story
Miss Arendt told.
It
had not struck me particularly, especially since it
was not new; anybody who had followed the Kastner case or had read
reviews of the Hilberg book was familiar with the fact of Jewish co–
operation; such cooperation, indeed, was only another facet of the
story told in concentration camp literature by Rousset, Margarete Buber–
Neumann, Bettelheim, and others: the leaders of the victims cooperated
with their jailers. My original feeling proved to be right: in a book of
two hundred and sixty pages, eight pages are devoted to the cooperation
of the Jewish leadership with Eichmann's office, and two and a quarter
pages to a discussion of privileged categories of Jews (war veterans,
famous people, etc.) . Both passages are certainly critical, and the
second, which reviews the conduct not only of Jews but of Gentile
groups in pressing the Nazis for "special" treatment for Jews, seems
to
me harsher. Besides this there are passing references to Jewish co–
operation or the lack of it.
Now some of Miss Arendt's critics complain that she gave too much
space and prominence to this topic (how can one measure prominence?),
while others, including Abel, say that her treatment was too short. The
only way to have satisfied both parties would have been to omit the
whole subject, which is probably what most Jews would have liked
best. My conclusion is that those who were truly shocked and pained
by these "revelations," were not shocked and pained by the fact (which
they must have known about at least vaguely) but by the context
in
which it was put. Miss Arendt's boldness was in putting this distressing
material in the context of the Nazi guilt, where Jews felt it did not
