Coming soon to movie theaters throughout the world, “Operation Finale,” directed by Chris Weitz, tells the story of the tracking and capture of the notorious Adolf Eichmann, a chief architect and facilitator of the Nazi’s so-called “Final Solution” intended to wipe out the entirety of European and ultimately world Jewry.
Fifteen years following the end of World War II, Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad and its security agency Shin Bet carried out a politically delicate and daring raid in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina to capture Eichmann who escaped Germany with his wife and two sons.
Following a successful attack, Israeli forces captured the Nazi officer alive and whisked him back to Israel for trial.
In the Presence of Courage and Greatness
Only rarely in my life have I been aware of being in the presence of greatness. It was clear to me as I shared breakfast with Justice Gabriel and Ruth Bach seven years ago that this was indeed one of those times.
As we sat at a circular booth in their hotel dining room in downtown Omaha, Nebraska, potted plants stationed beside a buffet bar filled with delicacies, Gabriel and Ruth shared with us the pride and the pain of their full and illustrious lives escaping the coming cataclysm, traveling the world, raising three children, and losing their precious eldest son to cancer twelve years ago.
I cannot recall an occasion in my life where I have witnessed a greater sense of wisdom, brilliance, and grace than I did seated beside these two remarkable people.
One month earlier, my good friend Beth Seldin Dotan, today now former Executive Director of the Institute for Holocaust Education centered in Omaha, Nebraska, invited me to present the keynote address at a day-long workshop at Wayne State College sponsored by her Institute and the Nebraska Holocaust Education Consortium of active and deeply committed public school teachers dedicated to Holocaust education. The workshop focused on ways to incorporate Holocaust studies into the curriculum for Nebraska college and university pre-service teacher education students.
Beth asked me to tell my family’s story in the Holocaust, which I agreed to do. She also asked if I would like to stay an additional day to join her in meeting and escorting Justice Gabriel and Ruth Bach to various events they were invited to address during their short stay in Omaha.
Justice Bach acted as a lead prosecutor at the Adolf Eichmann trial over a half century ago in Israel, and he served as a Justice in Israel’s Supreme Court. Beth’s obvious enthusiasm and interest in meeting this couple was contagious, and I immediately accepted her gracious invitation.
Personal Connection with the Holocaust
My family history has certainly undergirded my life’s work. One day, when I was very young, I sat upon my maternal grandfather Simon (Shimon) Mahler’s knee. Looking down urgently, but with deep affection, he said to me, “Varn,” (through his distinctive Polish accent he pronounced my name “Varn”), “you are named after my father, Wolf Mahler.”
According to Ashkenazi (European-heritage) Jewish tradition, a newborn infant is given a name in honor of a deceased relative. The name is formed by either taking the full name or initial letter of the name of the ancestor being honored. I had the good fortune of being named after my great-grandfather Wolf Mahler.
As it has turned out over the years, he not only gave me my name, but he also gave me a sense of history, sense of my identity, and the purpose of my life. In fact, my Hebrew name is Ze’ev, meaning “Wolf.”
I asked Simon: “Where is Wolf now?,” and he quietly and gently responded: “My father Wolf and my mother Bascha, and most of my 13 brothers and sisters are all dead.”
In surprise, I said: “How did they die?”
“People called Nazis killed them because they were Jews, except for my mother who died earlier before the Nazis invaded my town of Krosno, Poland.”
Those few words my grandfather told me almost about 65 years ago have reverberated in my mind, haunting me ever since.
Simon never fully recovered from those days of World War II. Though he kept the faces and voices of his homeland within him throughout his life, the Nazis also invaded my grandfather’s heart, killing a part of him forever.
Bringing About Justice
Following our breakfast where we got to know one another and where Justice Gabriel and Ruth Bach shared some very personal and intimate details of their extraordinary lives, Beth and I escorted the Bachs to another site in downtown Omaha where Justice Bach was to give an address to approximately 150 members of the Nebraska Bar Association at a brown bag luncheon and reception.
Justice Bach began by telling the assembled about his early life. He was born in Germany in 1927. He attended the Theodor Herzl School in Berlin. He told us about a premonition his father had in 1938, which led to their leaving Germany for Holland when Gabriel was 11 years old.
As it turned out, only two weeks later, Nazi storm troopers rampaged through several German cities ransacking Jewish-owned business, homes, and synagogues in what later came be known as Kristallnacht. Following another of his father’s premonitions, the family fled Holland just one month before Germany’s invasion of that country.
The Bachs set sail for Palestine on the ship Patria, its last successful trip to Palestine before the Germans sank it. Gabriel Bach later learned from a Christian friend in Berlin, that he was the only Jewish survivor from the Herzl school.
Gabriel Bach may best be known to the world community for his tireless work as a lead prosecutor in the trial of the Nazi SS Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was ultimately responsible for the murder of approximately four million Jews in the death camps and another two million by mobile extermination units.
Following the end of World War II, allied soldiers captured Eichmann. However, since his name was not then widely known, he was able to escape from an American internment camp in 1946, and eventually flee to Argentina.
Living under an assumed name for several years in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Israeli intelligence agents captured him in 1960, and nine days later, secretly abducted him to Israel to face a public trial in Jerusalem.
The Israeli court charged Eichmann with 15 criminal counts including crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish people. On 15 December 1961, the court sentenced him to death, and he was hanged on 31 May 1962 in Ramleh, Israel.
In his introduction of Justice Bach at the meeting with the Nebraska lawyers, the moderator showed a video segment from the trial between prosecutor Bach and a Hungarian woman, a victim of Eichmann’s ruthless persecution of the Jews. Justice Bach talked then about the most emotional moment for him at this historic trial.
He recalled the testimony of a survivor whose family perished at a concentration camp. At the trial, Bach asked this man to recount his experiences.
“The man told me,” said Bach, “when we arrived at the camp, Nazi soldiers ordered us into a single-file line. They then sorted us into two lines. I later learned that the people they sent to the right, soldiers marched directly into the gas chambers. Those on the left, they packed into the barracks destined for the work units.”
“I can clearly to this day remember the sounds and images. For my dear wife, they shouted, ‘To the right,’ and my little two-and-a-half year old daughter, ‘To the right.’ My young son asked the guard, ‘Where should I go?,’ and the guard answered, ‘Okay young man. You can go to the right with your sister and mother.’ The guard asked me what was my profession, and I said I was an engineer. He demanded that I go to the left.”
“I watched my wife and my son fade into the distance and then swallowed up by the crowd, and the last image I can remember was seeing this tiny but bright red coat, the coat I bought my daughter, grow smaller and smaller into a mere dot and eventually evaporate into the distance. This is how my family disappeared from my life.”
Upon hearing this at the trial, Bach could no longer speak, a lump gathering in his throat. Following an uncomfortable silence, the judge demanded Bach to continue questioning the witness.
To regain his composure, Bach began fiddling with his papers, but he could not find his voice for some time. Passing through his mind he fixed on his own two-and-a-half year old daughter, the daughter he had only recently given the gift of a bright red coat.
“From that time forward, I can be attending a sports event. I can be dining at a restaurant. I can be sitting outside, and suddenly I hear my heart beating loudly. And then I turn around, and I see a little girl or a little boy wearing a red coat.”
Stephen Spielberg heard about this incident from the trial and later contacted Justice Bach for the details. He later incorporated this event into his film “Schindler’s List,” a movie filmed virtually in black and white, except for a scene where Schindler peers into a concentration camp and among the grittiness, the pain, and the sickness, sees a young girl wearing a bright red coat.
Sometime later in the film, he chances upon the coat again, though this time it is torn and filthy and the girl is nowhere to be seen. This becomes a critical moment in his emerging consciousness that moved Schindler to take action against the horrors around him.
In his preparation for the trial, Gabriel Bach read the autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. In the book, Hoess recounts a conversation he had with Adolf Eichmann who vehemently argued for the extermination of children first so that the Jewish people will never again repopulate Europe.
Bach read this passage in Hoess’s book just before first meeting with Eichmann in his prison cell. In Omaha, Bach recalled that when sitting just inches away from this man who played a leading role in the annihilation of European Jews, “It was difficult for me to keep a poker face at this particular point in time.”
As I sat listening in quiet respect to this incredible man, tears welling in my eyes, I thought once again about my family.
With moist eyes, I said to Justice Bach following his moving talk, “Thank you for bringing to justice the man responsible for ordering the death of members of my family. Thank you for bringing justice to the man responsible for ordering the death of members of the Jewish family.”
Without a further word, our eyes locked motionless in deep connection and profound comprehension, and I felt a sense of peace.
Photo Credit: Getty Images