Not a banal evil Yesterday I read the most terrifying story I can imagine. It was a case presented during an interview by "Die Zeit" to Mr. Gabriel Bach, the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial in Israel. In this interview he explains the huge work they undertook in reviewing documents sent to them by the German government, including requests addressed to and orders given by the plaintiff. His team also contacted and interviewed many witnesses. There was also an interesting remark made by him about Hannah Arendt's work and point of view which grabbed my attention. According to him, Eichmann did not simply followed orders, he was not a nobody in the commanding chain. Instead, Eichmann was a convinced advocate of the horrible task over which he had full command and he made everything unimaginable to achieve his goal. This is not a mere opinion of Mr. Bach, he supports this view on Eichmann's testimony and some key documents. In one example, his team found evidence of Eichmann refusing even a direct order from Hitler to spare the life of a prisoner of interest. The one thing that shocked me, and that I didn't know about before, was a tactic implemented by Eichmann on the concentration camps. Somehow the inmates were made to send postcards to their relatives and friends telling them that they were in a wonderful place, and that they should come and visit them. Mr. Bach met and presented in the trial a survival who had received one of these postcards and who had traveled with his family to Auschwitz just to be witness of the loosing of his wife and two children; his little girl wear a red coat at the moment she was taken by the soldiers and from his life. The testimony from this man and the little girl with the red coat appear in Steven Spielberg's movie "The Schindler's List." At this point in the interview there was a long silence by Mr. Bach.