You've heard of me.  My name has been in all the papers, and you have talked about my life and hoped for my death.  For a few months I have replaced Hitler as the symbol of the Nazi regime, the most accessible target for blame.

My arrest brought back to you those days just after the war when you first heard what we had done.  At a loss for an explanation, you pushed us to the back of your mind.  The implications of the six million deaths were too staggering for you, and you chose not to think about them.  You soon had the concentration camps and the gas showers in a category by themselves, more ghastly than your nightmares.

Then you heard that I was alive, that the story hadn't quite played itself out, and my presence forced you to think once again about what we did to the Jews.  But it wasn't so hard this time.  You no longer were faced with blaming the Germans as a people, a citizenry that couladn't be that much different from you and your neighbors.  You could vent those frustrations on me, Adolph Eichmann, chief of the Gestapo Office of Jewish Affairs--and I could be that much different.

You were disappointed when you saw the pictures of me, weren't you?  The Nazi identification picture reappeared, showing me as a baby-faced young soldier.  And the new pictures did even more to shake your notions about me.  I was balding, broken, tired-looking--more to be pitied than hated, and you wanted so badly to hate me.  You wanted me to froth at the mouth, to be hunch-backed, to be somehow bigger than life.  You wanted me to resemble those villains who stalk your darkest dreams, so you could keep my acts in that same realm.

You're even surprised now, ill-at-ease that I'm not talking like a madman.  You're having trouble persuading yourself that I'm really Adolph Eichmann.  But I am Eichmann, and I did everything you have heard that I did.

I killed six million Jews.  One million of them were children.  Do you have any idea how large a number six million is?  Do you know that if you killed one person every minute of every day, it would take you nearly twelve years to kill six million people?  I killed six million Jews.  Not personally, of course.  I had a great deal of help.  But I was in charge.  I designed the camps.  I was responsible for their efficiency.  I was given a job and I did it well.  My defense at the trial was that I was a soldier, under orders, a small cog.  You laughed:  "What kind of defense is that?  He was a soldier?!"  If you didn't laugh, you mentioned Nuremburg, and your listeners nodded and said, "Yes, it was his duty to protest."

I was a soldier.  I was part of a state that would rule the world.  I had everything I wanted, and millions of people had to scurry to get out from under my feet.  I could but snap my fingers and they would die.  Or I could wave my hand and they would live--live as I chose that they should live.  They cowered before me like rats.  The trembled when they heard my name.

We won victory after victory on every front; we were invulnerable.  And the furnaces burned twenty-four hours a day, unable to shut down for a moment without slowing the stream of fuel that I directed into their mouths.  Then the mood changed.  Our armies weakened, the fronts moved closer to home, the state was crumbling.  We gradually realized that all was lost.  Himmler killed himself.  Hitler did the same.  I left Berlin in the uniform of a private.  I was captured, but no one recognized me.  I escaped and managed to get out of the country.  I had a plastic surgeon change my face and began fifteen years of running, always wondering on every train if the man across the aisle would recognize me, always afraid on every street that the man behind me was a Jewish agent, bent on doing his part to end the story of the Nazis.  I had killed millions of his brothers.  I had perhaps even held his life in my hands, but I had to rush to hiding like a hunted animal.

I eventually made my home in Argentina, in the country, far from any neighbors.  I had a job in the city, and rode the bus to work and back every day--two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening.  Every day was a fearful encounter with imagined enemies; every night was a lonely vigil.  But it was enough just to be alive, and eventually the pressure began to ease.  Then, before I knew I was being watched, I had been captured and rushed to Israel, surrounded by people who still had my prison numbers burned into their arms.  Israel, filled with Jews who had missed their date with death.  I told them I had been a soldier, and they screamed at me of families who had begged me for their lives.  They showed me to the world, and filled the papers with the story of my life.

"Look at this," they said, "and never let it happen again."  And they sentenced me to death, as if they could, by killing me, somehow make sure that it wouldn't happen again.  So I will die, and you will sleep a little easier tonight because I am gone.

Trembling at the evil in me has purged you of the guilt for the evil in yourself.  You are made holy by comparison, and I die, like Christ, to atone for your sins.  You don't like that comparison, do you?  You would rather compare yourselves with Christ, as you rid the world of evil.

But perhaps you are affected differently.  Maybe you don't feel holy at all.  Maybe you will not sleep better when I am dead.  Perhaps sleep will elude you when you think about my having been alive.  Look at your neighbors.  Look at yourself.  The bitch that bore me is always in heat.

I spit on you.