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Back The One from the Other Save as PDF
Chapters (50)
  1. Praise
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. ONE
  7. TWO
  8. THREE
  9. FOUR
  10. FIVE
  11. SIX
  12. SEVEN
  13. EIGHT
  14. NINE
  15. TEN
  16. ELEVEN
  17. TWELVE
  18. THIRTEEN
  19. FOURTEEN
  20. FIFTEEN
  21. SIXTEEN
  22. SEVENTEEN
  23. EIGHTEEN
  24. NINETEEN
  25. TWENTY
  26. TWENTY-ONE
  27. TWENTY-TWO
  28. TWENTY-THREE
  29. TWENTY-FOUR
  30. TWENTY-FIVE
  31. TWENTY-SIX
  32. TWENTY-SEVEN
  33. TWENTY-EIGHT
  34. TWENTY-NINE
  35. THIRTY
  36. THIRTY-ONE
  37. THIRTY-TWO
  38. THIRTY-THREE
  39. THIRTY-FOUR
  40. THIRTY-FIVE
  41. THIRTY-SIX
  42. THIRTY-SEVEN
  43. THIRTY-EIGHT
  44. THIRTY-NINE
  45. FORTY
  46. FORTY-ONE
  47. FORTY-TWO
  48. EPILOGUE
  49. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  50. Teaser chapter

I myself didn’t care to judge Eichmann. It was not my right. For all the fact that he had escaped justice, he cut a rather sad, forlorn figure on the boat. He knew he would never see Germany or Austria again. We didn’t speak very much. Mostly he kept himself to himself. I think he felt ashamed. I like to think so.

On the day we sailed out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic Ocean, he and I stood together on the stern of the boat and watched Europe slowly disappear on the horizon. Neither of us spoke for a long while. Then he heaved a big sigh and said: “Regrets do not do any good. Regretting things is pointless. Regrets are for little children.”

I feel much the same way myself.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Nakam, or Vengeance, squads were real. Just after the war, a small group of European Jews, many of them survivors of the death camps, formed the Israeli Brigade. Others acted from within the U.S. and British armies. Their sworn purpose was to avenge the murders of six million Jews. They murdered as many as two thousand Nazi war criminals, and planned or carried out several large-scale acts of reprisal. Among these was a very real plan to poison the reservoirs of the cities of Berlin, Nuremberg, Munich, and Frankfurt, and kill several million Germans—a plan that fortunately was never carried out. However, a plan to poison the bread for 36,000 German SS POWs, at an internment camp near Nuremberg, did go into action, albeit in a limited way. Two thousand loaves were poisoned; four thousand SS men were affected, and as many as a thousand died.

Lemberg-Janowska, the camp where Simon Wiesenthal was interned, was one of the most barbaric in Poland. Two hundred thousand people were murdered there. Friedrich Warzok, the deputy commander, was never caught. Eric Gruen, the Nazi doctor, was never caught.

Adolf Eichmann and Herbert Hagen really did visit Israel. Eichmann was trying to make himself an expert in Hebrew affairs. He planned to learn the language. He also met with Haganah representatives in Berlin.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a ferocious anti-Semite who led several pogroms in Palestine, which resulted in the deaths of many Jews. He had been canvassing a “final solution to the Jewish problem” as early as 1920. He met with Eichmann in 1937, and first met Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941. This was less than eight weeks before the Wannsee Conference, at which Nazi plans for the “final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe” were outlined by Reinhard Heydrich.