Finally, if the mission of the Trial was to convict anti-Semitism, how could it have failed to post before the world the contrasting fates of the countries in which the Final Solution was aided by native Jew haters -- i.e., Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia -- and those in which it met the obstacle of human solidarity -- Denmark, Holland, Italy, Bulgaria, France? Should not everyone have been awakened to it as an outstanding fact of our time that the nations poisoned by anti-Semitism proved less fortunate in regard to their own freedom than those whose citizens saved their Jewish compatriots from the transports? Wasn't this meaning of Eichmann's experience in various countries worth highlighting?

As the first collective confrontation of the Nazi outrage, the Trial of Eichmann represents a recovery of the Jews from the shock of the death camps, a recovery that took fifteen years and which is still by no means complete (though let no one believe that it could be hastened by silence). Only across a distance of time could the epic accounting begin. It is already difficult to recall how little we knew before the Trial of what had been done to the Jews of Europe. It is not that the facts of the persecution were unavailable; most of the information elicited in Jerusalem had been brought to the surface by the numerous War Crimes tribunals and investigating commissions, and by reports, memoirs, and survivors' accounts.