Hunting Eichmann (2 page)

Fearing assassination by Jewish partisans and Allied commandos, Eichmann was very careful with his security. He preferred to remain in the background, exercising his authority through his subordinates, and he rarely allowed his photograph to be taken. As a precaution, he always carried with him in his staff car an arsenal of submachine guns and grenades.

In his new headquarters, the Master spent the first of many sleepless nights putting together all the elements of the machine that would, stage by stage, systematically exploit and then remove every single Jew in Hungary. In his mind, they were the enemies of the Reich, and like a cancer, they needed to be rooted out and destroyed.

At the crack of dawn on April 15, the last day of Passover, this machine came to the door of the family of Zeev Sapir. Zeev was twenty years old and lived with his parents and five younger siblings in the village of Dobradovo, located ten miles outside Munkács, a city in the mountainous Carpatho-Ruthenia district of northeastern Hungary.

Gendarmes roused the family and ordered them to pack. They could bring food, clothes, and bedding, but no more than fifty kilograms per person. The few valuable family heirlooms they owned were confiscated before they were driven into the streets. Gendarmes then bullied and whipped the community of 103 people to Munkács on foot. The very young and old were carried in horse-drawn hay carts.

In the month since the Germans had occupied Hungary, Sapir had endured with dignity the many strictures placed on the Jews. There had always been anti-Jewish fervor among the people of Carpatho-Ruthenia. Born into a strongly Orthodox family, Sapir grew up being called "Jew-boy" by other children and had lived through the various regimes that had controlled his corner of the world during his short life. Whether Czech, Hungarian, or Ukrainian, they had all oppressed his people. The Hungarians had taken his elder brother away to a forced labor camp a few years before. At first the Germans proved no worse. Zeev wore his Star of David along with the rest of his community. He maneuvered around the curfews and travel restrictions to continue his black-market trade in flour that supported his family. The other measures imposed by the new government, such as press restrictions, job expulsions, prohibitions from public places, and seizures of Jewish property, among many others, had not had much immediate effect on the poor, rural village that was his home.

Now, however, he was scared. His family reached Munkács in the evening, exhausted from carrying their baggage during the long march. The streets were packed with men, women, and children, all moving in the same direction. They arrived at the brickyards of a former brick factory, their new home. Over the next several days, 14,000 Jews from the city and surrounding regions were crammed into the ghetto. They were told that they had been removed from the "military operational zone" to protect them from the advancing Russians.

The news was no comfort to Sapir, whose family lived in a makeshift hut with little food other than spoonfuls of potato soup served from bathtubs. There was even less water, the ghetto having access to only two water faucets. As the days and nights passed, the crying of children from hunger and thirst almost became too much for Sapir. Then came the torrential rains. Exposed under the open sky, there was no escaping the downpour that turned the brickyards into a mud pit and fostered an epidemic of typhoid and pneumonia. Somehow Sapir, his parents, and his four younger brothers (ages fifteen, eleven, six, and three) and sister (age eight) avoided getting sick.

By day, the Hungarian gendarmes played their cruel games, forcing work gangs to transfer piles of bricks from one end of the ghetto to the other for no reason other than to exercise their power.

By his third week in the ghetto, Sapir had no idea how long they were to stay there or where they would be sent afterward. One ventured such questions at the risk of a severe beating. Sapir read in a local newspaper he was passed that a high-ranking SS officer would soon inspect their ghetto. Perhaps this German officer, whose name was Eichmann, would provide an answer.

On Eichmann's arrival, the entire population of the ghetto was ordered to gather in a semicircle in the main yard. Surrounded by an entourage of thirty Hungarian and SS officers, Eichmann strode into the yard wearing square riding pants and black boots and cap. In a strong, clear voice, he announced to the prisoners: "Jews: You have nothing to worry about. We want only the best for you. You'll leave here shortly and be sent to very fine places indeed. You will work there, your wives will stay at home, and your children will go to school. You will have wonderful lives." Sapir had no choice other than to believe him.

Soon after Eichmann's visit, on May 22, the trains arrived on the tracks that led to the former brick factory. Brandishing whips, blackjacks, and Tommy guns, guards forced them from the ghetto to the train tracks. Every last man, woman, and child was stripped, their clothes and few belongings searched for any remaining valuables. Those who hesitated to follow orders were beaten miserably. The terror and confusion were profound.

A guard shredded Sapir's personal documents and then returned his clothes. After dressing, he stayed with his family and the others from his village as they were hustled into a cattle car. All 103 Jews from his village were crammed into a single car that would have fit 8 cows. They were provided with a bucket of water and an empty bucket for a toilet. The guards slammed the door shut, casting them into darkness, and then padlocked the door.

The train rattled to a start. Nobody knew where they were headed. As the train passed small railway stations along the way, someone attempted to read the platform signs to get some idea of their direction, but it was too difficult to see through the car's single small window, which was strung with barbed wire to prevent escape. By the end of the first day, the heat, stench, hunger, and thirst became unbearable. Sapir's young siblings wept for water and something to eat; his mother soothed them with whispers of "Go to sleep, my child." Sapir stood most of the time. There was little room to sit, and what room there was, was reserved for the weakest. Villagers of all ages fainted from exhaustion; several died from suffocation. At one point, the train stopped. The door was opened, and the guard asked if they wanted any water. Sapir scrambled out to fill the bucket at the station. Just as he came back, the guard knocked the bucket brimming with water from his hands. They would have to do without.

Four days after leaving Munkács, the train came to a screeching stop. It was late at night, and when the cattle car door crashed open, the surrounding searchlights burned the passengers' eyes. SS guards shouted, "Out! Get out! Quick!" Dogs barked as the Jews poured from the train, emaciated copies of their former selves. A shop owner from Sapir's village turned back toward the car: he had left behind his prayer shawl. A man in a striped uniform, who was carrying away their baggage, pointed toward a chimney belching smoke. "What do you need your prayer shawl for? You'll soon be in there."

At that moment, Sapir caught the stink of burning flesh. He now understood what awaited them in this place called Auschwitz. An SS officer divided the arrivals into two lines with a flick of his hand or a sharply spoken "Left" or "Right." When Sapir and his family reached the officer, Sapir was directed to the left, his parents and siblings to the right. He struggled to stay with them but was beaten by the guards. Sapir never saw his family again. As he was led down a dusty road bordered by a barbed-wire fence, his battle for survival had only just begun.

Six weeks later, at 8:30 on the morning of Sunday, July 2, 1944, air raid sirens rang throughout Budapest, the Queen of the Danube. Soon after, the first of 750 Allied heavy bombers led by the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force released their explosives onto the city. Antiaircraft guns and German fighter planes attempted to thwart the surprise attack, but they were overwhelmed by wave after wave of bombers and their escorts. Eichmann hunkered down in his two-story hilltop villa, formerly owned by a Jewish industrialist, as Budapest was set ablaze. Four hours later, the last of the bombers disappeared on the horizon. Columns of smoke rose throughout Budapest. The saturated bombing flattened whole neighborhoods. Refineries, factories, fuel storage tanks, railway yards, and scores of other sites were destroyed. Thousands of civilians died.

Emerging unscathed from his villa, Eichmann saw Allied leaflets drifting down from the sky and landing on his lawn. The enemy propaganda revealed how the Soviets were pushing east through Romania, while in the west, the Allies had landed in France and Italy and were driving toward Germany. The Third Reich was facing defeat, the leaflets promised, and all resistance should be stopped. Further, President Franklin Roosevelt had declared that the persecution of Hungarian Jews and other minorities was being followed with "extreme gravity" and must be halted. Those responsible would be hunted down and punished. Neither an Allied bombing nor a threat by an American president nor even Hitler himself was going to divert Eichmann from completing his masterpiece, the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, which had begun in earnest with the deportations from Munkács.

Eichmann left his villa to assess any damage to his headquarters at the Hotel Majestic. His achievements to date were fresh in his mind. By the first week of July, the plan that he had crafted had shown itself to be monumentally effective. Five of the six operational zones where Jews were slated for deportation, totaling 437,402 "units," had been cleared by the Hungarian authorities, who had proved to be more than willing accomplices in his designs. Every day, an average of four trains carrying a load of 3,500 were received at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only 10 percent of arrivals were deemed fit enough for the labor camps. The balance earned "special treatment" in the gas chambers. Eichmann's early coordination with the camp's commandant, Rudolf Höss, ensured that the extermination camp was ready for the numbers to be processed. The staff had been increased, the ramps expanded, a new three-track railway system built, and the crematoriums updated.

Only the Jews of Budapest remained in Hungary. They had already been relocated into designated houses marked with a yellow star, and a curfew prohibited them from leaving these abodes except between 2:00 and 5:00
P.M.
Police and gendarmes from the outlying provinces were in place to assist in the upcoming deportation, and the trains were being scheduled.

Still, there were forces gathering against Eichmann's plans, and with the Allied advance on both fronts and now the attack on Budapest, these forces had some teeth. Over the past few weeks, international protests—from Roosevelt to Pope Pius XII to the king of Sweden—had urged Admiral Miklós Horthy, the regent of Hungary (whom Hitler had kept in a figurehead position), to end the actions against the Jews. Horthy was receptive to these calls, not only because of what he had recently learned about the extermination camps from a report by two Auschwitz escapees but also because of the recent coup attempt by Hungarian state secretary László Baky, a key ally of Eichmann's in the Interior Ministry. Five days after the Allied bombing, on July 7, Horthy suspended the deportations and dismissed Baky and his cronies from their positions.

Incensed at the interruption, Eichmann nonetheless ordered his deputies to send 7,500 Jews held in a brick factory north of the city to Auschwitz. He met no resistance. A week later, he attempted the same with 1,500 Jews at the internment camp Kistarcsa, eleven miles outside Budapest. After the city's Jewish Council learned of the train's departure, they convinced Horthy to halt it en route to the extermination camp and return to Kistarcsa. Berlin had yet to respond to Horthy's suspension of the deportations, but Eichmann did not care. He was not about to allow the regent to block his plans. On July 19, he summoned the Jewish Council to his office. While one of his underlings kept the members of the council occupied, Eichmann sent SS troops to Kistarcsa and brutally forced the Jews back onto the train. Only when it crossed the border into Poland did Eichmann re-lease the council.

That same week, Hitler weighed in on the conflict with Horthy. Wanting to keep him in alliance with Germany, Hitler offered to allow 40,000 Budapest Jews to immigrate to Palestine, but the rest were to be deported to the camps as planned. This did not please Eichmann, who did not want one single Jew to escape his hands. He strode into the office of the German plenipotentiary in Hungary.

"Under no circumstances does the SS Reichsführer Himmler agree to the immigration of Hungarian Jews to Palestine," Eichmann raged. "The Jews in question are without exception important biological material, many of them veteran Zionists, whose emigration is most undesirable. I will submit the matter to the SS Reichsführer and, if necessary, seek a new decision from the Führer."

The plenipotentiary and Berlin were unmoved. With the war going poorly for Germany, many in the Reich leadership, including Himmler, viewed the Jews as much-needed bargaining chips. Eichmann thought this was weakness, even though he was worried about his own future, admitting to an SS colleague that he feared that his name would top the war criminal lists announced by the Allies because of the unusually public role he was playing in Hungary.

In August, when the Russians conquered Romania, Himmler shelved the plans for the deportations completely. Eichmann was ordered to disband his unit in Hungary, but still he did not relent. Except for a short mission to Romania, he lingered in Budapest for the next two months, waiting for his chance to return to his plans.

He rode horses and took his all-terrain vehicle out to the countryside. He spent long weekends at a castle owned by one of his Hungarian counterparts or stayed at his two-story villa, with its lavish gardens and retinue of servants. He dined at fashionable Budapest restaurants and drank himself into a stupor at cabarets. With his wife and three sons in Prague, he kept two steady mistresses, one a rich, thirty-year-old divorcée, the other a Hungarian count's consort. Eichmann had enjoyed some of these pursuits since first coming to Budapest, but now he had more time than ever to indulge in them. Even so, he was increasingly edgy at the progress of the war. He smoked heavily and often barked at his underlings for no reason.