The hotel’s hall is neutral yet dignified; foreigners talking at reception. In the restaurant on the mezzanine I am met by a waiter in a lilac-coloured dinner jacket. Thank you, I say, all I’m doing is having a look. I am satisfied with that ‘all I’m doing’, which corresponds with my sense that, Oh, sir, all I’m curious about is what could those few steps have been like that Adolf Eichmann — accessory to the murder of many millions of people, as well as an accessory to reducing Budapest to ruins — took. That’s all, as well as the fact that there was a time when he passed this way just like I am just passing by this way. What, I wonder, could he have seen when casting a glance through the enormous windows at the Danube, the ruined buildings, not to say the tank traps and trestles, the big guns guarding the head of the bridge, which it is quite certain were standing there, because an esteemed colleague, who, by the way, ate dinner here, recorded as much in his diary. That’s all, sir, that what it’s about, that’s all …
The furnishings in the conference room are salmon pink.
Györgyi called yesterday. I’m back, she said in a voice that did not seem to be stating that she was back but was asking whether I was back, as if she knew that I was travelling and, furthermore, knew precisely where I was and whether I was there or already here; as if she were familiar with the feeling of uncertainty that, for me, is the everyday state of the zone between not remembering and not forgetting, and she had similar feelings; yes, as if she had also not got back from an obligatory trip on which she had substituted for a teacher colleague but from a journey that was real enough but nevertheless could not be called that.
It has been obvious for quite a while that Györgyi is following me and that is how she is trying to find a way into the past, yet the way she said I’m back was that by way of her voice she implied that I, too, wanted her to follow me.
Adolf Eichmann enters the restaurant. The army officers with Arrow Cross armbands jump up just as before when Kurt Becher arrived. Eichmann does not deign to greet them.
Gizi, Gertrud and Lutz are drinking their coffees. Another SS officer, thinks Gizi. Gertrud has her back to the newcomer. Gizi raises the coffee cup to her lips. She has a vague recollection of having seen the high-ranking officer before. He’s not a hardened soldier; his look speaks more of an intellectual and as if he was not seeing what he was looking at. Gizi supposes, He’s not looking at me but at something behind me, not the Danube, though. Maybe he’s thinking of his family; he’s around forty, so no doubt he has a wife and maybe children.
‘I did not understand Becher,’ Carl Lutz will write in his diary.
Why would he want to meet me another time? I have learned since then that for the sake of his business transactions he was in direct contact with Himmler, who wished to receive a cut of the pickings from the Manfred Weiss industrial conglomerate in Hungary. Becher placed himself at his service and in return Himmler had suggested that the Budapest ghetto ought not to be reduced to ashes, which was what Eichmann was ready to do. With an eye to the future, Himmler had already started to distance himself from Hitler, and he exploited the fact that although the extermination of Europe’s Jews was Eichmann’s particular province, he ranked merely as an Obersturmbannführer and therefore had to treat Standartenführer Becher as a superior officer.
And,
The two of them fought each other like jackals, but when Eichmann stepped into the hall he was sweet-tempered and acknowledged without comment what it was that Becher was to keep him posted about. Becher gave him no instructions, stressed that he was informing him of an order coming from staff headquarters, and meanwhile acted as if it was not Eichmann he was speaking with but turned to me, as if what was most important for him was that I take note of his intervention, and when it was possible I should pass that on to the appropriate authority. Even many years later I have no wish to imagine what Eichmann’s expression must have been like. All the same … The look lacked any feature that would have allowed one to deduce what I knew about him. That is was what remains most memorable. Yesterday, while writing my diary, I read that the Hamburg-based 101 Reserve Police Battalion of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei), which included middle-class professionals, officials and skilled workers, without being given any specific order and acknowledging no political standards or moral norms other than those of the Nazis (that’s what it says), massacred several thousand Polish Jews in 1942. Might it be that taking action without thinking can result in more evil than the evil instincts that reside in man anyway? Everything that is happening here is all so ordinary, is what I read from Eichmann’s face, this Becher and this Swiss as well, which is to say me. Gertrud once said that Eichmann is proof of what man is capable of, and at the time I agreed with her. Now I hold a different view, but I am not in a position to discuss it with Gertrud. I don’t think he is proof of what man is capable of but what man is.
He underlines the two words then gets up from the writing desk. Through the window he can see the far shore of the lake and the green hills of the Appenzeller Vorderland. If he were to step over to the window opposite he would be able to see the church spire of Walzenhausen and that favourite rocky peak of the Meldegg. He returns to the desk, Not long ago at the bottom of a crate he had found his first diary: ‘Today I made a decision to keep a diary, and with God’s assistance I shall carry it on so as long as I am able to.’ The entry is dated 16 June 1914.
After some more rummaging he comes across two communications from the Consular Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berne:
We draw to attention once more that your correspondence should always be circulated with a copy to the head of the legation. We are firmly convinced that if you had kept Herr Kuebler, the Consul, fully informed he would have stopped you from committing professional mistakes.
That communication is dated 3 May 1938. Lutz could not remember what the professional mistakes in question had been; all he recalls is that in 1938 Kuebler was Consul-General of the Swiss Legation in Palestine.
The second communication is dated 17 September 1938:
It has come to our notice that you are preparing copies of official communications for your own private collection. As you are probably well aware, under no circumstances may federal officials lay claim to materials that they have committed to writing in their official capacity.
Carl Lutz wonders how many drawers at home must be filled with his diaries and files.
I muse that my country’s policy was not to extend recognition to Stalin, and how right it was, but to recognize Hitler and Mussolini. Those who reminisce often pose the question, what kind of people were those diplomats? I posed similar questions myself in 1944 in Budapest: what kind of people were the Hungarians who cooperated with Hitler? Exactly what? What kind of Hungarians? And what kinds of Swiss are my superiors?”
He puts down his pen. Who, he wonders, poses questions like that? He supposes that everything vanished even for him, despite all his efforts; to no avail the reminders of his diaries and photographs.
He steps over to the window once more.
The look-out on the Meldegg is easy to spot, but the emotion that he felt when he first glimpsed the rocks is irretrievable.
The story has been lost, he writes, but why should it have been brought home to me on that particular day; that I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now either, he notes down five years later, when he reads what he wrote on 19 September 1962.