Eichmann in My Hands: A First-Person Account by the Israeli Agent Who Captured Hitler's Chief Executioner
290
Eichmann in My Hands: A First-Person Account by the Israeli Agent Who Captured Hitler's Chief Executioner
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Overview
1n 1960 Argentina, a covert team of Israeli agents hunted down the most elusive war criminal alive: Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Holocaust. The young spy who tackled Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street—and fought every compulsion to strangle the Obersturmführer then and there—was Peter Z. Malkin. For decades Malkin’s identity as Eichmann’s captor was kept secret. Here he reveals the entire breathtaking story—from the genesis of the top-secret surveillance operation to the dramatic public capture and smuggling of Eichmann to Israel to stand trial.
The result is a portrait of two men. One, a freedom fighter, intellectually curious and driven to do right. The other, the dutiful Good German who, through his chillingly intimate conversations with Malkin, reveals himself as the embodiment of what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” Singular, riveting, troubling, and gratifying, Eichmann in My Hands “remind[s] of what is at stake: not only justice but our own humanity” (New York Newsday).
Now Malkin’s story comes to life on the screen with Oscar Isaac playing the heroic Mossad agent and Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley playing Eichmann in Operation Finale.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504055499 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 08/28/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 290 |
| Sales rank: | 426,386 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Harry J. Stein is an American author and columnist. As of 2009, he is a contributing editor to the political magazine City Journal. Stein is a graduate of Pomona College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Peter Zvi Malkin was an Israeli secret agent, an intelligence legend, and member of the Mossad intelligence agency.
Harry J. Stein is an American author and columnist. As of 2009, he is a contributing editor to the political magazine City Journal. Stein is a graduate of Pomona College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Resistance of the Powerless
Among the pivotal figures in my life — certainly in this story — is someone I hardly recall at all. I was only four and a half in 1933 when the rest of the family left our village in eastern Poland for Palestine, leaving our sister, Fruma, behind. Exit visas were in desperately short supply. At twenty-three, Fruma had a husband and children of her own. Somehow she would join us later.
It was the first time any of us had been apart for more than a couple of days. My parents had four children, but to me, as the youngest, it had always seemed there were just two of us and four doting grown-ups. Jacob was just two years older than me, but there was a fifteen-year jump up to Yechiel, already old enough to work beside our father, buying wheat from farmers in the outlying districts for sale to the local mills. And Fruma, living next door, constantly in and out of the house, was more like a second mother, as nurturing as our own and less intimidating.
I recall only fragments of those early years: the look of certain faces, the sense of being in particular places, random moments so extraordinarily vivid that it sometimes seems I must have made them up. But, too, I recall a feeling of warmth and security I have never known since.
Fruma is at the center of the most persistent of those memories. It is late afternoon and, playing behind the house with Jacob and her son Takele, our best friend, I take a hard fall, banging my head. Almost instantly Fruma is holding me tight in her arms, rocking me back and forth, singing softly. Looking up through my tears, I see large blue eyes and, from beneath a maroon kerchief, wisps of blond hair.
Another memory. Moshele, my sister's brother-in-law, the village dandy in his elegant tunic and polished boots, is in our house late one winter night, telling stories. All the grownups are laughing. Though he is a little hard to follow, since he is using a different voice for each character, our parents encourage us to stay up until the end. My sister stands with her back to the warmth of the oven wall, her eyes glowing, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.
And another. Straying from my mother and Fruma, I am drawn to the village church. Inside, it is such a contrast to our drab wooden synagogue. I am most fascinated by the statue of the naked, bloody man on the cross. When they find me, my mother is furious; back on the street, she shakes me violently, tells me I'll end up like Piatnik the Thief. It is my sister who takes me home, explaining once again about the Poles and the Jews, and telling the story of Piatnik.
Strange as it sounds, in later years I would not even remember the name of our village; partly because, in Palestine, my parents would so seldom talk about it; partly because, when they did, I would refuse to listen. But I would never forget my almost mystical connection to Piatnik the Thief. In a time and place where such superstitions were taken very seriously, I had been born at the very moment he lay dying alongside the well in the center of town, two long stab wounds in his chest.
For Jews, being afraid of the Poles was a way of life. It was understood we were at their mercy. Indeed, our very speech was full of code and double meaning. We would never refer to the taxman but to "the one with the papers"; we would say "yellow" when we meant gold. The resistance of the powerless. One never knew when "they" would lash out, or why. As a grown-up my brother Yechiel would still bear scars from the time he was beaten unconscious by a Polish peasant with a club for being too slow in pulling his cart to the side of a dusty road to let him pass. At the time Yechiel was eleven years old.
A last Polish memory. One evening, walking home with Jacob from our cheder, the tiny school where we studied Hebrew and the Holy Books, we are suddenly aware of a brilliant orange sky. When we reach the center of town, we see our synagogue is in flames. One of our neighbors, Baruch the candy seller, has been killed.
But that is almost secondary. What I recall most clearly of that evening is my parents fighting. They never fought. My parents were as devoted to one another as any man and woman I have ever known. Though she was capable of wicked sarcasm, my mother never turned it on my father; she always got her way through gentle persistence. In the end my father, allowed to maintain the delusion that he was in charge, could deny her nothing. But on this night my mother is screaming. He can stay, she cries, and she will take us by herself. My father, controlled at first, starts yelling back; then he storms out of the house.
Huddled together in bed, terrified, disbelieving, Jacob and I take it all in.
In memory it seems only a split second later. But knowing what I do now, it must have been at least a couple of months after that that Jacob and I found ourselves at the rail of a ship, pushed and jostled by those behind, as we squinted toward Palestine in the distance. Those larger people crowded around us seemed to have lost all control, shouting with joy, breaking into song; but I felt only confusion. Staring at the landscape through the shimmering midday heat, I could see only brown: stony tan hills, occasionally relieved by a dusty stone house or a twisted dry tree. Where were the lush jungles and tropical forests? Where were the fantastic birds? Where was the milk and honey?
Now, as we drew closer, we began to pick up activity in the harbor: Arab porters, barefoot with trousers rolled to their knees, running in all directions, the peddlers of oranges and dates, countless others on heaven knows what business engaging in vigorous disputation. We might as well have been going to live on another planet.
"Jacob," I said softly, taking his hand, "I don't like it here. I want to go home."
My brother must have found the prospect of this new existence even more frightening than I did. Sweet-natured Jacob was one of those boys, so prized in the land we were leaving behind, already recognized as intellectually gifted. His great passion was the study of the Holy Books.
"Quiet, Peter," he gently soothed. "Have faith in God."
Then there were the other questions. Why had Jacob and I been told to answer to a different last name? Why was my father having to pretend to be a rabbi? Above all, where were Fruma and her children?
I would begin to learn the answers only when I became acquainted with this new land and its history. The British, in control of Palestine under the terms of the mandate granted after the First World War, were vigorously limiting Jewish immigration. Indeed, it was only through incredible resourcefulness — and more than a little subterfuge — that our mother had managed to secure exit certificates; and even at that, she could only get five. Somehow she would find a way for Fruma and her family to join us later.
I saw my first British police within the hour, when a half dozen boarded our ship from a launch. I was amazed to see these grown men wearing shorts. It soon became clear, however, that they were the opposite of pleasantly informal.
On shore, as we made our way through the chaos of the harbor into the narrow streets of Haifa, our bags atop a hired donkey, policemen pushed and beat their way through the crowd with their short clubs.
"What's the difference?" muttered my father. "Are these any better than the ones in Poland?"
We were heading for the eastern slope of Mt. Carmel. My father had some distant relatives living there and my mother had written them of our impending arrival. We were therefore more shocked by what happened next than anything that had come before. Arriving at the tiny building of concrete and stone after a grueling three-hour walk through the heat and desolation, we were greeted by the woman of the house, a certain cousin Ruchele, tight-lipped and severe, wire-rimmed glasses perched on a sharp nose. Having come to Palestine some twenty years before on her own, Ruchele and her husband had chosen to live in this place with their baby through their commitment to Socialist Zionism, and she could hardly inform us soon enough of her contempt for all we represented: We were in the land of Israel now, there was a country to be built. Here there was no place for parasites.
When she stopped her harangue, she led us into the house, installing us in a room perhaps seventy feet square. Three beds had been crammed in for the five of us and the heat was oppressive. Ruchele had warned us not to speak above a whisper so as not to wake her baby.
For a long moment we sat on the beds, staring at one another in silence. Then my father rose to his feet, terrible pain on his face. "I'm going for a walk," he said.
Wordlessly I scurried after him.
My father was hardly the most communicative of men. I am not sure he ever spoke the words "I love you" in his entire life. But now he took my small hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. It meant the same thing.
We walked for ten minutes in silence, our worn shoes making crunching sounds on the baked soil. Finally he took a seat on a large stone. "We've got to get out of here," he said, his gaze taking in the entire mountain, if not the country itself.
I stared at him, waiting for more. There was nothing.
"Papa," I said softly, "what will we do here?"
"We'll work." He snorted. "It's like Ruchele says, we'll work."
"What about Fruma?"
"They'll join us soon enough. With God's help they'll come."
"Will I work too? And Jacob?"
"Don't worry, Peter, you'll do fine. You're braver than you think." He paused and offered a small smile. "Remember Piatnik the Thief."
I thought about it. What did he know that I didn't? I didn't think of myself as brave at all. I was only a little boy.
My father pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it with a long-wicked Polish lighter.
"Papa, tell me about Piatnik the Thief."
"He was a nobleman, Piatnik the Thief. I knew his father a little."
"But why did they kill him? He wasn't a Jew."
He took a long drag on his cigarette. "He was friendly with the Jews. He was a good and very brave man. He would warn us of what was coming."
"He helped us?"
He nodded. "If Piatnik were still alive, they wouldn't have been able to burn the synagogue." He paused, looking around at our barren surroundings, then at me. "He gave his life trying to do what was right. It is something worth trying to live up to."
CHAPTER 2The Seeds of Power
In 1933, an obscure twenty-seven-year-old SS sergeant named Adolf Eichmann, having just completed his formal military training, was about to begin a spectacular rise through the Nazi hierarchy.
Eichmann was born in 1906 in Solingen, Germany, the first of five children. When he was eight, his accountant father moved the family to Linz, Austria, to become a commercial manager at the electric works. A remote figure, stern and deeply devout, for many years an honorary elder of the town's Evangelical congregation, Karl Eichmann ran an austere and loveless household. Above all else, it nurtured respect for thrift and order.
His eldest child was uncertain and withdrawn. A mediocre student, Adolf Eichmann made little impression on his peers in Linz, home to the young Hitler a generation earlier.
The one great serious disruption in the young Eichmann's childhood would appear to be the death of his mother in 1916, when he was ten. Yet, revealingly, by his own subsequent account, it affected him hardly at all. He noted simply that in short order his father remarried and life continued as before. More than forty years later, Israeli interrogators would be struck by the undercurrent of resentment with which he still spoke of his father, and by so extreme a hostility to the religion in which he had been raised that, pliable as he otherwise tended to be, he refused even to consider taking the oath on a Bible in court.
In the years after the German-Austrian defeat in World War I, his evident sense of powerless rage began to find expression as extreme militaristic posturing. Though only a teenager, he contrived to march alongside battle-tried former soldiers in parade formation, and tried to insinuate himself into the tradition-bound, quasi-military fencing club at a local university, another cauldron of jingoistic discontent.
One of his history teachers during this period was a certain Dr. Leopold Poetsch, whose rabid nationalism had once stirred the young Hitler. Now Poetsch fueled in Eichmann the conviction, increasingly widespread among the alienated young of the era, that Germany had lost the recent war not on the battlefield but behind the lines, cheated of victory by treacherous leftists and greedy Jews.
Eichmann's anti-Semitism undoubtedly started more as a theoretical position than as anything visceral. His closest childhood friend was a Jew named Harry Selbar.
But as his political fervor intensified, so did his enthusiasm for the program of National Socialism. Though the Nazis' brand of racism was not only crude but wildly inconsistent — before working-class audiences, Jews were described as "capitalist bloodsuckers"; before the wealthy, as Communists and revolutionaries — by the late twenties Eichmann accepted it whole, without question. For, of course, according to Nazi doctrine, doubt itself was intolerable, and the restoration of German greatness demanded the elimination of such "weak" character traits as compassion or a commitment to honesty.
Almost immediately, party work became the central focus of Eichmann's life. When, as the Depression worsened, he lost his job as a salesman of service station products for an oil company, he seized the opportunity to leave Austria and join a regiment of the Nazi military arm, the SS, based outside the town of Dachau in southern Germany. He lied to his father, saying that he had been fired by a Jewish inspector because of his party activities. Though the SS training was brutal, Eichmann flourished. Throughout the rest of his life he would show off the scars on his elbows and knees, the result of drills in which he was obliged to crawl over barbed wire, boasting how in that year he rid himself of all susceptibility to pain.
His training complete, Eichmann volunteered for the SD, the security service of the SS, where he was assigned the relatively modest rank of Scharführer, roughly the equivalent of sergeant. But by now Hitler had ascended to power, and in those early, heady, chaotic days of the Third Reich, anything was possible for an ambitious young man unburdened by conscience. Early in 1935 a subordinate of SS chief Himmler, casting about for a candidate to direct a proposed "Jewish Museum," a euphemism for a new bureau that was to collect data on the holdings of German Jews, found his way to Eichmann. Accepting the position eagerly, the young SS man launched himself into the study of Jewish history and culture. In astonishingly short order, he was known in high Nazi circles as an expert on the Jews.
More than that, Eichmann was already beginning to show the kind of surprising creativity and zeal for which, as thecampaign against the Jews escalated, he would become known, and which, on the record, would be a greater source of personal satisfaction than any he had ever known.
Among other things, he visited Palestine in 1937, arriving with a very specific agenda: to establish contacts with the violently anti-Semitic grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, and to learn firsthand about the Jewish community in the Holy Land, with which, as the Nazis' resident "expert on Jewish questions," it was assumed he would one day have to deal.
"I was not just a recipient of orders," as he put it years later, in response to the familiar suggestion that he might have been more administrator than initiator. "Had I been that, I would have been an imbecile. I was an idealist."
CHAPTER 3Out of the Old Testament
I myself was eight years old in 1937 and living in a state of quiet turmoil. Having lived in Palestine three years, I certainly gave every appearance of having adjusted to circumstances there; indeed, I had begun to carry myself with a decided swagger, cocky and apparently fearless. Yet, within, I very much remained the naive and sensitive child of the shtetl I had been before.
My posture was a simple matter of adjustment to circumstances. It had not taken long to grasp how harsh this new world was going to be — or what it would take to survive it. Just a few weeks after our arrival, my mother took Jacob and me to the Haifa construction site where my father and Yechiel had landed jobs making bricks. It was backbreaking labor: fifteen-hour days under a brutal sun hauling sand, breaking stones, mixing cement, with pay not by the hour, but by the brick, a horrifying scene out of the Old Testament with my own father in the middle of it. But even more shocking was the behavior of the boss. Large and red-faced, sweating like a pig, he drove the workers with continual abuse. When at long last one of the men to whom he was particularly harsh dared to answer back, the foreman sent him to the ground with a vicious blow to the face. "I'm the boss here, you lazy bastard!" he screamed. "Don't you dare contradict me!"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Eichmann in My Hands"
by .
Copyright © 1990 Harry Stein and the Estate of Peter Z. Malkin.
Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover
- Dedication
- Preface
- Introduction
- One Resistance of the Powerless
- Two The Seeds of Power
- Three Out of the Old Testament
- Four Out of the Bureaucratic Shadows
- Five The War Begins
- Six The Eichmann Authority
- Seven A New Army
- Eight A New Life
- Nine A “Good” German
- Ten Spy
- Eleven Israelis in Germany
- Twelve Blindman’s Buff
- Thirteen Target
- Fourteen The Plan
- Fifteen Buenos Aires
- Sixteen The Road to Garibaldi Street
- Seventeen Safe House
- Eighteen “Un Momentito, Señor ”
- Nineteen The Ideal Prisoner
- Twenty Eichmann in My Hands
- Twenty-One The Mind of a Murderer
- Twenty-Two The Statement
- Twenty-Three Escape
- Twenty-Four Back in Jerusalem
- Image Gallery
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgments
- Index
- About the Author
- Copyright
