The world was riveted when one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, was captured in Argentina in 1960, taken to Israel, and put on trial.

Journalists from many countries converged on the courtroom in 1961 to watch prosecutor and then Israeli attorney general Gideon Hausner dramatically illustrate the magnitude of Eichmann’s crimes by bringing forth dozens of survivors to testify.

For his part, Eichmann tried to portray himself as a bureaucratic functionary who was simply following orders after swearing an oath to Adolf Hitler. And after the high-ranking Nazi was convicted and hanged, one of the journalists in the courtroom, Holocaust survivor and philosopher Hannah Arendt, created a monumental uproar with her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann as an ambitious bureaucrat—a thoughtless “desk murderer” not emotionally driven by a hatred of Jews—was highly disputed in subsequent years. And her claim that the prosecution was more intent on characterizing the Eichmann’s actions as a crime against Jewish people rather than a crime against humanity resulted in her being viewed in Israel as an example of “Jewish self-hatred” and as anti-Zionist, according to a lengthy 2019 Haaretz article by Holocaust-studies researcher Michal Aharony.

Aharony’s 2019 piece, “Why Does Hannah Arendt’s ‘Banality of Evil’ Still Anger Israelis?”, pointed out that the now-deceased intellectual’s books have been translated into Hebrew after years of being boycotted in Israel. And that has led to some vigorous public debates.

Israeli theatre artist Lilach Dekel-Avneri is among those who are deeply fascinated by the various interpretations of Eichmann. She spent six years researching and writing a major interdisciplinary production with 21 scenes, which was going to be presented by her company, the Pathos Mathos Company. But when the pandemic struck, she had to revisit her plans.

The result is a pared-down work created for the camera on video, The Eichmann Project–Terminal 1, which will be shown at this year’s Chutzpah Festival: The Lisa Nemetz Festival of International Jewish Performing Arts in Vancouver.

It revolves around three characters: Hausner, Arendt, and Israeli poet Haim Gouri, who was a journalist in 1961 covering the trial of Eichmann for the newspaper LaMerhav.

The playwright and director described the Gouri character as her version of the “Greek chorus” between the protagonist, Hausner, and the antagonist, Arendt.

“His language is more poetic,” Dekel-Avneri told the Straight over Zoom. “He is trying to tell the story chronologically and they disturb him.”

The three characters rely on the texts of historians but that’s just one of several layers, according to Dekel-Avneri. There’s also an exploration of the performative nature of the trial.

She emphasized that The Eichmann Project–Terminal 1 is not a reenactment and none of the survivors’ evidence is presented. Nor does this work erase or humiliate those who shared their experiences.

This is not Dekel-Avneri’s first theatrical foray into the Holocaust. Far from it. Her interest in the subject began as a girl listening to her grandmother’s stories of surviving the Second World War when so many other Jews were murdered.

“The questions that arose originally back then were mainly: 'how can it be?' ” Dekel-Avneri said. “ 'How is it possible that a nation would follow such a crazy, insane idea?' So during my youth, I started reading a lot about the system and about Hitler…trying to figure out the dehumanization that they did to human beings.”

Her first theatrical project in university was writing her grandmother’s story. It included a moment when her grandmother encountered a German officer. They spoke about theatre and opera. And that, according to the playwright, may have saved her grandmother from being murdered.

“He had an opportunity to kill her and he decided to let her go,” Dekel-Avneri said.

Since then, she’s continued researching evil for several years. Yet she still feels that she needs to deepen her understanding of this subject to comprehend what brings people to embrace an ideology that she feels is completely against human nature, morality, and the responsibility of citizenship.

This exploration of evil led her into directing Muranooo, which she described as a “black comedy” about the Holocaust by Polish writer Sylwia Chutnik. The heroine, a Polish grandmother, hears voices in the night. It sounds like a young boy crying out “Muranooo, Muranooo, Muranooo.”

It’s set in Muranów, which is a part of central Warsaw that was the Jewish Ghetto in the Second World War.

“They say bones and stones were mixed together in order to build the walls,” Dekel-Avneri said. “So you can hear a lot of stories. Even my assistant in Warsaw, she told me that she rented an apartment in Muranów and after a few days she left it because she really heard voices.”

The play was performed in Warsaw.

One of the Holocaust writers who’s influenced Dekel-Avneri is K. Zetnik (pseudonym of Jehiel Dinur), a Polish-born Jew who survived Auschwitz and later moved to Israel. He testified at Eichmann’s trial.

She said that she admires his “performative writing”, showing the gritty details of the Holocaust up close. She also reviewed his testimony at the trial of Eichmann.

Another author who influenced her thinking is contemporary German philosopher Bettina Stangneth, who wrote Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer.

This 2011 book documented Eichmann’s secret life, exposing his deception in presenting himself at the trial as some sort of small-time bureaucrat. In fact, Stangneth revealed that he retained close links to SS members after the Second World War and he bragged about his mass deportations of Jews to concentration camps.

As a result, Dekel-Avneri came to conclude that while Arendt was correct in laying out her argument that evil can often be banal, it did not apply to Eichmann.

“It doesn’t mean her theory is wrong,” Dekel-Avneri said. “Her theory is very true.”

Moreover, she agrees with Arendt’s claim that what happened in Israel in 1961 was a show trial. And Dekel-Avneri criticized the prosecutor, Hausner, for not presenting a case that would lead society to ask the “important questions”.

“The trial was focusing on the pain and how we suffer,” Dekel-Avneri noted. “He was not focusing on the system that made that horrible period of time exist.”