Subscribe They were mostly old people who had been through the atrocities who felt that
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They were mostly old people who had been through the atrocities who felt that. I would like to go to Israel, but I don't want to offend anyone by my presence."Ricardo Eichmann has said he doesn't want a tear-jerker story written about him: "It is an affront to the six million who died to try and elicit sympathy for me." But his life story is very much a case of the sins of the father being visited on the son "It's like a rocket. For the first time in three hours his face registers pain."I know there are people who feel like that about me What can I do? Perhaps it is my fate. You know when the article came out about my meeting with Aharoni, they did a survey in Israel. For every three people who were positive towards me, there was one who thought I must be a Nazi. I tell him that my grandmother, a German Jewish refugee, is angry and hurt that I am interviewing him. I never wanted anyone saying that I didn't believe what he had done."Since Ricardo Eichmann's heritage has become public knowledge, he has received calls from neo-Nazis, expecting to find a sympathetic ear.
"A few weeks ago, I got a call from Australia, from a man who said, 'Eichmann was OK.' I said he most certainly was not."On the other side of the coin are the Holocaust survivors who believe that Ricardo Eichmann "has it in his blood", "it" being a genetically transmitted racism. I went to see the deportation orders, black on white, that my father had signed. What was I supposed to do?"Professor Eichmann's facial muscles begin to twitch "I know now that pain comes from not knowing That is why I am not afraid to confront the truth I always wanted to know. Was he not even angry with his mother for not explaining things to him?"Look," he says "I am bitter about the fact I had no father I am furious about the horrors of the Holocaust And it would have been better if she had talked to me I wanted to challenge her, but I saw her inner turmoil I loved her and she loved my father. I remember always going bright red when people mentioned Nazis and SS men."I am struck by Ricardo Eichmann's apparent lack of anger.
He wasn't angry with his father's kidnappers, he wasn't angry with the Israelis for hanging him. Over coffee, he says: "Once, at school, the history teacher started talking about an exam she had set on the Eichmann trial Later she called me in She said she hadn't meant to offend me She hadn't realised I was in the class. "If you want to know what they think of me talking about this, you had better go and ask them," he says. One senses that he has dissociated himself from his siblings; later, seeing a picture of his elder brother Horst as a youth wearing an SS uniform, I understand why.He envied other children whose fathers had been killed in car accidents or died of illness At least, he says, they knew the truth. "When I was 13 or 14, I opened a magazine and saw a picture of - what do you call it in English?" He traces the shape of a noose around his neck "Ah yes, the noose which hanged my father Then I understood."There is a silence Professor Eichmann needs some fresh air We walk down a slope towards the piazza. When I asked my mother, she would say, 'Lass das' - leave it.
It was a taboo subject and stayed that way till my mother died two years ago."Ricardo Eichmann has not shared his anguish with his brothers and has communicated with only one of them. My mother kept all the newspaper cuttings about him under the sofa I would creep under there and peek at them I understood bits and pieces but not the whole picture. Money was tight - the widow of a Nazi war criminal was not entitled to a pension - so Vera's family helped financially, but emotionally Ricardo was on his own. "I knew my father was dead, but I didn't know how he had died.
"Adolf Eichmann," he says, "is a historical figure to me." But the historical figure left him with a disturbing legacy: a fatherless childhood, an adolescence filled with darkness and half-truths, and a lifetime label of "Eichmann's son".Vera Eichmann left her two eldest sons in Argentina and brought Ricardo and his elder brother back to Germany to be educated. Adolf Eichmann deserved to be brought to justice for what he did. I don't agree with the death penalty, but I can see why they did it at the time."He pronounces his father's name as if he were talking of a stranger. The man who corrected his childhood memories was Zvi Aharoni, the Israeli secret service agent who spent months observing the Eichmann family in Buenos Aires before kidnapping Adolf Eichmann, disguising him in an air steward's uniform and flying him to Israel.Ricardo Eichmann met his father's kidnapper in a room at the Heathrow Hilton "It was a very emotional meeting People have asked if I feel anger towards him I don't. Perhaps he had done that later, in Germany, when his father had been hanged and he still hoped he might come back. I remember him taking me into a sweet shop and buying me some chocolate.