Introduction

The discovery of a valise of old letters written to his Armenian grandfather from an Auschwitz survivor starts Avi Arutiyan on an odyssey to uncover the mystery surrounding his grandfather’s unsolved death. From the killing fields of Anatolia to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Avi’s quest opens a door into intersecting paths and dark secrets of three families, stretching back to 1915.

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Excerpt

In the glass cage, the little man listened, unmoved. He didn’t consider himself guilty. Not in the sense of indictment. You see a man alone, isolated and despised, and you want to pity that man. But not him. I couldn’t understand him human-to-human; he was somehow from a different place. He had all the physical characteristics of a human being and yet he was different. What did the extermination even mean to him? He didn’t remember where, when and how many he sent to their deaths. But he remembered nice dinners he had. From the Wannsee conference that planned a mass murder, he remembered having cognac by the fireplace. Here was Adolf Eichmann, in the dock, very ordinary, very harmless. But when he had the power… If they won the war, what would he have looked like?

That night I had another dream of dancing children. They wore school uniforms, the girls in white blouses and dark-blue skirts, the boys in white short-sleeves and black pants. Shirts and blouses were emblazed with a school logo of a tree being consumed by a fire. I couldn’t see their faces in the darkness. The children took each other’s hands and formed a large circle. All, but one boy that held a torch. The boy threw the torch into the middle and a great pyre lit up, hissing and crackling. I was outside of their circle and even there I felt the immense heat and took a step back. But the children didn’t mind. The boy that had the torch joined the circle, and they began to dance: two steps counterclockwise, kicked off their left leg, then their right one, two more steps. They danced silently, with the roar of the pyre being the only terrible music. Their faces were lit up by the orange flames, but I still couldn’t see their features. They went faster and faster. Soon they were dancing on their toes. And then they defied gravity and rose off the cold ground, first by a foot, then a yard, then the circle became a beautiful rotating blur that went up higher and higher, above the pyre, above the embers, into the dark sky.

I woke up in a cold sweat and remembered that we had school children visit the museum two days prior, and last night I walked by a building where they burned some old leaves.

Ten weeks into the trial, Eichmann finally took the stand. He looked different, grayish, afraid at last. In a low voice he told us the story of his misfortune. He was no anti-Semite. He was nobody important; he just happened to have taken up Jews as his specialty. He worked to help the Jews. He had always sought peaceful solutions, but like Pontius Pilate he had no choice. He never acted on his own initiative. Documents had been altered. Colleagues lied. He did not remember this, and he did not remember that. 115 skeletons for research? He did not remember. His name in the letter? OK, but he was not authorized. In Hungary, he was “marginally involved.” He was simply an “observer.” He was “unlucky.” He was the victim. The Washington Post found “dignity” in Eichmann.

For two months in that courtroom, he was a puzzle, an enigma to me. I couldn’t grasp the essence of his humanity. Until he opened his mouth and said that one sentence:

“The question of conscience is a matter for the head of the state.”

And that’s when I finally saw inside of him. Human beings have a conscience. Sometimes we blocked it in order to survive a bit longer, but it was always there. He didn’t have one, he gave his up voluntarily and permanently. He was a clever, malevolent non-human that feasted on power. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. What is the meaning of a “grey zone”? Which of the book characters, fictional and historical, would you place there?

2. Why “what must we do now?” is the first question in David’s diary? What choices was he referring to? What would you have done?

3. Why did Hannah Arendt refer to Adolf Eichmann as “banal”? Do you think he was?

4. Why did David refuse to take the needle in Grottaferrata? And why was he ready to accept it later?

5. Why was the Holocaust surrounded by silence until the Eichmann’s trial? What changed?

6. Why was David so upset by the results of Milgram’s experiments? Fifty years later – do you think the results would be different?

7. The book quotes Stanley Loomis: “There is no crime, no murder, no massacre that cannot be justified, provided it be committed in the name of an Ideal.” Loomis was writing about the French Revolution. Do you think the quote is applicable to the Armenian Genocide? Holocaust? Cambodian killing fields? Our time?

8. Why does the story of Rudolf Kasztner play such a prominent role in the book?

9. Why did the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF, Dashnaks) resort to Operation Nemesis? Do you consider it justified?

10. The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial – success or failure?

11. Eleos rejects the “lesser evil” arguments and points a finger not only at the criminals but also at those that stood by. Do you agree with that? Do you think it’s fair to accuse Pius XII of an “astonishing moral failure”? to accuse Allen Dulles of having no sympathy for the Armenian victims? Do you think that the CIA and the MI6 were justified in hiring criminals with anti-Communist credentials?

12. What do you think should be the role of morality in politics? Why does a character say: “Short-term, realpolitik. Long-term, more bloodshed”? Do you agree with him?

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