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assumed that the Eichmann trial would increase this lack of understanding.
But now it appears that, together with a great deal of negativism-the trial
has brought to light facts that may offset the incorrect evaluations that
prevailed before-he [Eichmann] was a decent young man. . . who, by his
own testimony, always merely carried out the abominable tasks that were
demanded of him. He did so unwillingly and with inner resistance... He
confessed that he could not consider becoming a doctor, for example, because
even an open cut made him sick to his stomach and he couldn't look... .In the
Chelmno camp Eichmann once watched a group of naked Jews being
executed by the gas engine, and he had to turn away.... Indeed the cries of
the victims grated on his nerves...."
Another excerpt, from a different sort of German newspaper,
Die
Deutsche Zeitung,
of May 25, 1961, said: ". . . One of the witnesses, testi–
fying about the methods of annihilation in Galicia, was asked why, in light of
the expected annihilation, the inmates of the ghetto did not gather their
strength for one last counterattack, even if it was hopeless. What a lack of
understanding! What an academic question! ... No one who has not been
through
all
this can truly understand. .. . The arguments of the witness, I say
[the speaker is the German reporter who covered the Eichmann trial], surely
hold good for the German people as well: No one who did not go through
what the Germans went through can understand. The war, which they per–
ceived as a battle for survival forced upon them from the outside, the day-to–
day worries about self-preservation, fear ofthe system..."
And at the end of his article this reporter adds some words of admira–
tion for the beauty of the people of Israel: "A young nation that bears arms
with enthusiasm, that loves its homeland without intellectual doubts, that truly
identifies its nationalism with its personality. Come, they say, and look at us:
Do we look like Jews. . .
?
Their faces bear no resemblance to the traditional
features . . . of the diasporaJew."
(Both excerpts were taken from an anthology,
The Eichmann Trial in
West German Public Opinion,
in Hebrew, edited by Avraham Bartura.)
A Polish man in Lanzmann's film, maybe from the city of Kolo or from
Chelmno, describes the reception given to the Jewish deportees on one of the
railroad platfroms. "It was... true German irony."
