Go back to The Eichmann Trial: Participants, Then & Now
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Beisky, Moshe
Witness to conditions in the Plaszow labor camp, Poland
1961 Quote: 5/1/61: ATTORNEY GENERAL GIDEON HAUSNER: Fifteen thousand people stood there – and opposite them hundreds of guards. Why didn’t you attack then, why didn’t you revolt?
BEISKY: I believe that this thing cannot be explained – it cannot be answered. To this there is no single reply. What I can talk of is the general situation. And perhaps from this it can be deduced. It will certainly be difficult for anyone who was not there to understand, but after all, this happened in the middle of 1943. This was already in the third year of the War, and it didn’t begin with this. It began with something else. The people were already, the whole of Jewry was already in a state of depression owing to what they had endured, during three years. This is one thing. And the second – nevertheless there was still hope. Here were people working on forced labor, they apparently needed this work. Possibly, maybe … it was plain at that time that if anyone did the pettiest thing – for it was not difficult when people, when many forces were standing there .. may I now be permitted to sit?
PRESIDING JUDGE MOSHE LANDAU: Certainly, you may also rest for a while.
1996 Quote: What should Eichmann’s sentence have been? My answer may seem strange but, it doesn’t matter to me what his sentence was because for me, Eichmann presents no danger anymore. Since my childhood I have been against capital punishment. No human being has the right to take the life of another human being, and for one Eichmann I am not ready to change the principles in my life.
