Go back to The Eichmann Trial: Participants, Then & Now
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Goldmann-Gilead, Michael
Police inspector of Bureau 06, which investigated Eichmann before the trial, and later Attorney General Gideon Hausner’s special assistant
1961 Quote: 5/2/61: WITNESS YA’ACOV BUZMINSKY: I first returned to this Polish woman, for I had nowhere to go back to. She had been left on her own. They killed her father and transferred the remaining members of her family to Germany for labor. She remained with her small sister, aged seven, and when she saw me bleeding all over and broken, this woman, who had previously been my neighbor in the place where I lived, took me in, washed me, and gave me a place where I could sleep.
ATTORNEY GENERAL GIDEON HAUSNER: And you remained there until the Russian army reached Przemysl and liberated you?
BUZMINSKY: Before that I went back to the ghetto, and in the ghetto I saw a German, Schwamburger, who had shot and murdered people, beating up a young lad, giving him eighty lashes with a strap.
HAUSNER: Do you see here, in this Court, that same lad who received the eighty lashes?
BUZMINSKY: Yes.
HAUSNER: Is he police officer Goldmann, who is sitting at my side?
BUZMINSKY: Yes. Normally a young man could not survive after fifty blows. And, generally, after fifty blows the young man would be dead. Since he survived eighty lashes, and he then ordered him to run and he ran, he let him remain alive…
HAUSNER: Subsequently you married the woman who saved you and she is now with you in Israel – and she is your wife?
BUZMINSKY: Yes, I married her and took care of her little sister who is now a doctor in Poland, and I am here now with my wife.
1996 Quote: I met Eichmann when he was in prison in Israel. I remember, when I sat opposite him for the first time, and he opened his mouth, I had the feeling, as if the crematoria of Auschwitz opened in front of me. I am a former inmate of Auschwitz. He made a desolate, pathetic impression. But we knew what he had done during the period of the Holocaust, and how he had behaved, and the comparison between the Eichmann then and the Eichmann who sat opposite us, made it difficult for us to comprehend, that he was the fifth man in the hierarchy after Hitler concerning the Jews.
