In the Dock

From the roof of Jerusalem's big, new community center building, green-capped security police peer down from behind machine-gun muzzles. Steel fences nine feet high keep passers-by away, and giant searchlights go on at night, bathing the neighborhood in glaring light. At the main entrance, guards shunt visitors through twelve cubicles for personal frisking. Upstairs, four stories above all his protectors and behind three barred doors, sits sallow Adolf Eichmann.

This week ex-Nazi Eichmann goes on trial charged with arranging the murder of 6,000,000 Jews during World War II. Each day, for months on end, he will be led down a guarded back stairway to take his seat in the bulletproof glass cage that surrounds the defendant's chair, listening through a headset, speaking through a microphone. At Eichmann's left will be the three Israeli judges who will decide his fate. In the amphitheater at his right will be the world's press, TV and radio correspondents. The latter clearly were the more important audience, for Eichmann's guilt already was clear; real purpose of the trial was to fix forever in the mind of the world the monstrous wartime crimes of the Nazis.

Front-Page Fare. Five hundred reporters have already arrived, clogging Jerusalem's cramped hotel space. Many of them stopped off first at the gas chambers of Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz to refresh readers' memories with the tales of such folk as Use Koch, the warden's wife accused of making lampshades of human skin.

For Germans with a conscience, the coming weeks would be grim. "We will be spared nothing," noted Hamburg's Die Zeit. "And this we do not want, of course.

We want our hideous past to be forgotten, and we tremble at the thought that the year of the Eichmann trial will bring humiliation." But, added the writer, "no one can deny that what Eichmann did took place in Germany and was done under a system that was created by Germans and was applauded for a long time . . . We must swallow the great bitterness."

Jewry itself was divided on the case, and the pros and cons filled pages of the Israeli press. To many, the trial seemed vitally necessary to educate the younger generation of both Israel and Germany. But other Jews were deeply disturbed by the illegal kidnap-arrest of Eichmann in Argentina. Many were shocked that Eichmann had found it impossible to recruit ex-Nazi colleagues to serve as defense witnesses. Reason: the Israeli government had refused to promise that they themselves would not be arrested if they set foot on Israeli soil.

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