Free Writing on the Wall by Mary McCarthy Page B

is that resistance was impossible. But between resistance and cooperation there was a small space in which some action—or, rather, resolution—might have been taken. Miss Arendt perhaps exaggerates the size of this space, and it must have varied from country to country and town to town. The example she gives of the Danish rabbi who called his people together, told them the truth, that an order had gone out for their deportation, and ordered them to disperse, no doubt would have been impossible to follow with success in countries where the native population was hostile and physically and culturally distinct from the Jews, but in some places, at some times, it could have been followed. Miss Arendt’s other famous sentence, that without the co-operation of the Jewish Councils four and a half to six million Jews would not have perished, seems to me almost self-evidently true. Had the Nazis been obliged to use their own manpower to select Jews for the extermination camps, number them, assemble them, ticket their property, and so on, they would not only have rounded up fewer Jews, but they would have felt the drain in their military effort; had Hitler persisted in the Final Solution, at the cost of diverting troops to carry it out, the war might have ended somewhat sooner. It is clear that refusal to co-operate would have met with terrible reprisals, but these reprisals in turn might have demoralized the army and the civilian population both in Germany and in the occupied countries, and chaos, the nightmare of generals, might have been the result. The Final Solution was preferred by the Nazis to mass execution by shooting because it could be carried out smoothly and efficiently—almost peacefully. And this allowed not only the Germans and the people of the occupied countries but the Jews themselves for a long time to remain ignorant of the true destination of the cattle cars moving east, on schedule. To say this is not—horrible charge—to “desire to maximize the role of Jewish leaders in the destruction of European Jewry.” Nor is it to show a lack of sympathy for their plight. To speculate on the past, as Abel ought to know, is not to blame (it is too late for that), but merely to wish, to regret, to close your eyes and see it done differently, in some cases to admire.
    Smoothly and efficiently—almost peacefully. This was the fearful characteristic of the Final Solution, and for this Eichmann, the transportation expert, was the perfect instrument. Of course six psychiatrists pronounced him normal; he was normal and average and therefore perfectly fitted for his job, which was to “make the wheels run smoothly,” in both a literal and figurative sense. His function was to normalize the Final Solution. With his conceit and boasting, his pompous home-made clichés and “winged words,” he was at once ridiculous and ordinary, for ordinariness carried to a zenith is absurd. No better example of the mass murderer who is at the same time a perfect family man (Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux) could be found than the ineffable Eichmann. One of his lawyers said he was like a mailman—a person you see every day on his methodical rounds and seldom notice. Naturally he got along well with Jews; it was part of his job to do so. Among the clichés he incorporated in his personality (to speak of his “character” would be a mistake) was the Some-of-my-best-friends cliché. That he could push this to the point of imagining that he had been converted to Zionism (the Jewish Final Solution) was pushing the logic of the cliché to the nth degree of complacency and self-delusion. How could Abel have missed the irony in Miss Arendt’s account of his “conversion”—a dramatic irony, furthermore, since when she tells the reader that Eichmann had been “promptly and forever” made a Zionist by reading a “basic book,” she is dryly summing up a speaker who had no idea of the effect on an audience of what he was saying? It was