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By Root 2215 0

banality of evil,” which some survivors found simplistic and offensive and which I was invited to refute in print. She greeted me amiably, telling me she had read and liked my work. Was she being sincere or merely courteous? I found her disconcerting and chillingly aloof. How could one delve into the tragedy and still retain that hardness in one’s eyes? The question I asked her was simple: “I was there, and I don’t know. How can you possibly know when you were elsewhere?” Her reply: “You’re a novelist; you can cling to questions. I deal with human and political sciences. I have no right not to find answers.” My essay “A Plea for the Dead” was an attempt to refute her accusations against Israel and to respond to the disdain she exhibited for the dead. In a famous letter Gershom Scholem scolded her for her lack of love for the Jewish people.

After court sessions I often joined a group of intellectuals who gathered around their uncrowned king, Joseph Kessel, on the terrace of the King David Hotel. The best French reporters were part of this circle. Kessel talked about other trials, other adventures. I liked him and admired his blend of strength and tenderness, and his stunning sensitivity and humanity. For him, as for us, Eichmann was an enigma and a challenge.

I remained obsessed by the same old questions. How to explain the power of evil and the complicity of the “neutral” countries? What about the passivity of American Judaism and the Palestinian Jewish community? If only the defendant could be declared irrevocably inhuman, expelled from the human species. It irritated me to think of Eichmann as human. I would have preferred him to have a monstrous countenance, like a Picasso portrait with three ears and four eyes.

I stared at him for hours on end, and he frightened me. Yet in his present state, locked in a bulletproof glass cage, he presented no danger. Why did he inspire such fear in me? Is there an ontological evil unrelated to action?

Jurists had long technical debates about the necessity of the trial, its conduct, and its probable outcome. Some said it would have been better for Israel to have turned Eichmann over to an international tribunal. Another debate: Could there be any punishment for crimes of this magnitude? Cain, after all, exterminated half the human race when he killed his brother, Abel, yet his only punishment was to bear the mark of his crime on his forehead. He remained alive, even untouchable. No one had the right to harm him. Martin Buber declared himself against the death penalty for Eichmann. He was not alone. As for me, I trusted in Israeli justice.

Years later, during a March of the Living, a pilgrimage of some five thousand youths to Birkenau, I stood near a retired Israeli police officer originally from my region. He was a camp survivor, a quiet but intense man. We said Kaddish together. He had been one of Eichmann’s executioners.

The Town Beyond the Wall appeared in 1962. I used a disquieting quotation from Dostoevsky as an epigraph: “I have a plan—to go mad.” But my plan was to combat madness. By which I mean that the only way to escape being contaminated by another person’s madness is by attempting to cure it. It was a lyrical, mystical adventure novel recounting one survivor’s itinerary—religious childhood, deportation, arrival in France; faith, rage, and friendship. His dreams of returning to his native town land him in a Communist prison cell, in the company of a mute madman. This book, my fourth, was favorably received and won the Prix Rivarol, awarded annually to a foreign novelist writing in French. One judge hesitated to grant the prize to the stateless person I still was.

During the reception in my honor I met Anna and Piotr Rawicz. Anna, blond and dynamic, was a film producer. Piotr, a writer of Polish origin, had won the same prize the year before for his masterly novel Le Sang du ciel, later published in the United States under the title Blood from the Sky. Today, as I write these words, I see Piotr in front of me: tall, his wiry frame slightly stooped, his gaze a mixture