Chris Petit on David Cesarani's new book about Adolf Eichmann:
In this excellent and thorough biography, with its emphasis on the political mechanisms and confusions that allowed for such a moral collapse, Cesarani points out that, by the time he was finished in Hungary in 1944, "he was rotten from the inside out". He explains Eichmann less in the context of totalitarianism than by charting the process through which a man not hard-wired to kill ends up a willing collaborator in the business of genocide.Primo Levi on Eichmann:
Oh son of death, we do not wish you death.
May you live longer than anyone ever lived.
May you live sleepless five million nights,
And may you be visited each night by the suffering of eveyone who saw,
Shutting behind him, the door that blocked the way back,
Saw it grow dark around him, the air fill with death.