Eichmann in My Living Room

I learned about the Holocaust before it was called the Holocaust. In my family, it was “the camps” or the “Nazi time” or “shh, don’t let the child hear.” No matter where or how or when our lives progressed, the shadow of the past lurked in our background like a sleeping wolf. 

I was my parents’ only child. At the age of nine, I was home alone after school one day in April 1961. I turned on the TV and found myself immersed in the horrific events that had taken place before I was born, events that my parents had lived through and that were still fresh in their memories. Events about which I’d heard only the barest outlines. Suddenly, I found myself watching the televised trial of Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for the murder of millions of Jews in World War II Europe. Among his victims were half a million Hungarian Jews, people just like my parents who, unlike those victims, managed in spite of all odds to survive the worst of the Nazi nightmare.

I felt the air of secrecy and anxiety, the reluctance to open Pandora’s box, which would release its nightmarish memories and flood our small New Jersey apartment.

The TV set was the centerpiece of our apartment’s small living room in Hillside, NJ, a comfortable suburb adjacent to Newark, which had been our family’s first stop in the United States. As a “latchkey” child who let myself in after school with the key I wore around my neck, I was expected to make myself a snack, play with friends or do homework until my parents came home from work a few hours later. Obviously, I did not always live up to this expectation, as the TV beckoned me to spend a few hours watching shows and wasting time before dinner.

My parents, of course, would watch the months-long trial on the evening news, shooing me away to do homework so I would not see graphic images that were (wisely) considered disturbing for a young child. I did not know this of course, and they could not control what I did alone after school. (“Parental controls” on media were yet to be invented.) The Eichmann trial, in effect, was the post-war world’s first introduction to the horrors of the Nazi era. In later years, I assumed I had watched the trial broadcast live, not realizing that it was videotaped—a new technology—with tapes flown and distributed to TV stations around the world daily. In fact, Israel did not have television in 1961; the first TV sets did not arrive until five years later, and Israelis followed the trial on the radio. The three judges at the trial, however, were convinced by an American producer to make the trial testimony available to the world, as a way of ensuring that these crucial stories would be told, retold and remembered. Thus, the events in that Israeli courtroom were broadcast to our New Jersey living room within 24 hours of being recorded.  

That first day I turned on the set, I found myself looking at a crowded courtroom with old men looking down from a high, long table. I only vaguely understood what they were talking about, but there I was, staring at grainy films featuring emaciated, naked bodies. People looking through bars wearing dirty striped clothing. Frightened children. Angry-looking guards in uniforms. It was all new to me, and though I had never minded being a latchkey kid—I actually enjoyed it—I suddenly felt frightened to be alone. I anxiously waited for the sound of my mother’s key in the door. 

In school, I was in fourth grade at the time, we chattered about the shows we were watching at home: Perry Mason, Bonanza, Candid Camera. We compared notes on the records we were listening to and what we had brought for lunch. But I knew that what I had seen during that trial was not something I was supposed to talk about. I looked around at my classmates at Hillside Avenue Elementary, afraid to mention what I had watched the day before, hoping someone would bring it up so I didn’t have to. No, in 1961 New Jersey the Holocaust did not exist. I learned many years later that there were a handful of other students whose parents had stories similar to my family’s, but it was not something we would ever have brought up at the time. I can’t explain why. Was there an unspoken rule that these awful things should not be mentioned outside of our homes? Were we ashamed? In post-war America, the whole story of my parents’ war years felt fantastical, like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale based on old European legends. It was indeed fantastical, until the day I turned on the TV after school and saw the photos that, along with oral testimonies of survivors, would lead Eichmann to his execution. There was no denying my parents’ reality after that.

At the age of nine I did not know the story of Adolf Eichmann. I did not know he had been a top aide to Adolf Hitler in charge of organizing wartime transportation to take Jews to death camps, nor how he had escaped after the war and was eventually caught in Argentina fifteen years later, to be brought to Israel and tried for war crimes. All I saw then was a thin, bespectacled man wearing headphones in a glass-enclosed cubicle with two uniformed men behind him. To the young me, his high forehead and thinning hair suggested an egg perched on top of a dark suit. He was not obviously frightening, as far as I could tell, but the idea of his being enclosed in glass, separated from the rest of the courtroom, suggested he was dangerous. Releasing him could unleash violence on the spectators, or so I thought. The grim expression on his face did nothing to change this impression. 

I may have thought doing my math homework at that point might not be such a bad idea, but I was riveted to the screen.

Soon I understood that he was connected in some way to the wrenching stories that people on the witness stand were telling. I now know that more than 100 survivors spoke at the Eichmann trial. I heard only parts, but their stories came through clearly. Theirs were like my parents’, but my parents’ stories in 1961 were only the barest skeletons of their full experience. “Eat your food. When we were in camp, we had no food.” That was the extent of what my parents had been able to share with me, when the world did not want to hear their stories. At the Eichmann trial, the Israeli government decided the world did indeed need to hear these stories, and the witnesses did their part, sharing details that my parents would not disclose for another twenty years. So I listened to these people, who looked so much like my parents and their friends, tell of the horrors of the ghettos, the camps, the forced labor battalions and slave labor factories. The Gestapo guards who took their families away, the neighbors who turned away from them, the SS who forced them to do terrible things and make terrible choices. It was all there, and I, like the rest of the world, was witness to their witness. 

Watching all this, I felt my world turn upside down.   

My mother and father came home from work that night, my mother at five o’clock, my father at seven. I could hardly look at them, and they immediately knew something was wrong, though I was afraid to explain. So, I did not tell them what I’d seen. Later in the evening, I could hear them from my room: They were watching the trial and speaking in low voices with each other. I could not tell what they were saying. The next day, the same sequence of events: Again I watched the trial, again I did not tell them how upset I was. Eventually, of course, I couldn’t keep it up, so one night at dinner, sitting in our kitchen on vinyl chairs at the Formica table, I shared that I’d been watching TV and had seen “the trial” with “the man called Eichmann.”   

My father responded more with resignation than anger: “He is an animal, a Nazi. You shouldn’t be watching that.” They relented then and told me that, yes, they had been in camps like the ones I had seen on TV.   

It turned out that Eichmann’s story, the story of how he organized the transport of millions to camps across Europe, was especially relevant to my family’s past. They told me that my mother Julia, her brother Laszlo and her parents—Maria and Joszef—lived relatively peaceful middle-class lives in Debrecen, Hungary, until 1944, just as the war was approaching its end. In March of that year, the Jews of Debrecen were rounded up in the local brick factory, then taken by train to Auschwitz, the infamous German-run concentration camp and killing center in occupied Poland. The logistics of this operation were organized by Obersturmbannfϋhrer Eichmann, along with help from the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s devoted fascist party. 

In Auschwitz, Nazis murdered my mother’s parents. She never saw her brother again; he was reportedly transferred and killed in Buchenwald. She survived through determination and luck (mostly luck), ultimately saved by transfer to a slave labor factory in Germany.  

My father Ivan lived with his family in the center of cosmopolitan Budapest. He was sent to a forced labor battalion with thousands of other Hungarian men, but his older sister Rozsa died of disease, along with her husband Miklos, in the German camp Bergen-Belsen. His younger sister Katalin was imprisoned in Bergen Belsen as well but survived and returned to Budapest where she lived out a long life. My father met his lifelong love, my mother, after the war. They soon left Hungary for Sweden, where I was born, and a few years later, in 1953, we emigrated to America.  

So the gist of their story was that, yes, many people in our family had died in those camps, and no, nothing like that would happen again as governments did not treat people that way anymore. It is what I wanted to believe and what my parents wanted to believe, so it was our truth: Terrifying things had happened, and now, in America, Jews were safe. This should have led to an avalanche of questions on my part, but somehow it did not. What they shared with me also seemed a mixed message: Jews are safe, but don’t trust a Gentile ever. America is a refuge, but we jump when we hear a knock on the door. I felt the air of secrecy and anxiety, the reluctance to open Pandora’s box (the one we learned about in fourth grade), which would release its nightmarish memories and flood our small apartment. So we all kept quiet about the war for a long time. The real conversations did not occur for another twenty years, when the world of survivors turned on its axis and it became OK, even necessary, to talk about the past that was just barely past. Books, movies, Holocaust museums—all were a cause and effect of processing trauma. In 1961, I thought about that trial every day for several weeks. And then, being nine, I forgot all about it and went on to other things: homework, piano lessons, Hebrew school. If other kids in school had stories like my family, I was not even curious. But sometimes at night the images of Eichmann returned, and I wondered if they would ever make sense to me.

Adolf Eichmann was found guilty by the Israeli court of crimes against humanity. In December of 1961 he was hanged, cremated and tossed into the Mediterranean Sea—a fitting end to one whose life extinguished so many others. I may have been too young to watch the trial; the parental controls and TV ratings we have now are a good thing. But the trial opened the box in my home that needed to be opened, and once that happened there was no going back.   

Anne-Marie Deutsch is a clinical psychologist living in Washington, DC.

Above image credit: Visitor7 (CC BY-SA 3.0)