My Dinner with Adolf Eichmann’s Great Niece

A surprising moment when history circled back on itself

I had already met my girlfriend’s best friend — call her Ingrid — several times before, and looked forward to another steak dinner full of gossip and laughter. Married once and vowing never again, Ingrid was happily single but liked playing matchmaker, coaxing her bestie to give me a whirl.

Thanks to Ingrid she did, and we owed our relationship to her. That made our get-togethers light-hearted and festive, that dinner similar to all our others until the conversation shifted to family. “You know my maiden name, right?” asked Ingrid. “Actually, no,” said my GF. “You never told me.”

“It’s ‘Eichmann’,” responded Ingrid. “‘Eichmann’ as in ‘Adolf Eichmann’?” I couldn’t help but ask. “Yes!” she said. “That ‘Eichmann’. I found documentation proving he’s related. I even found Nazi memorabilia, and old family photographs of various other relatives posing in uniforms.”

“No shit,” I said, and then shared my own family’s story: My father turned sixteen when the Germans took over his home city of Budapest, and was taken from his Jewish high school to work as a draftsman. Given an office, one morning he was told to prepare for a high ranking officer’s visit.

The nondescript guy with the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer walked right past him down the hallway. My father then survived the war, emigrated to South America, and was reading the paper in Caracas when on the first page he again saw the face of the Nazi officer from the war.

“That’s him!” Eichmann was captured in Argentina, tried, and executed by the Israelis in 1960. Having facilitated and managed the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions, Ingrid’s great uncle was one of the chief engineers of the Holocaust. Sixty years later, history came full circle.

Until that moment Ingrid had no idea I was Jewish, and I had no idea she was Adolf Eichmann’s grandniece. After that moment, we marveled at the thin but powerful tendrils of fate that can so suddenly tie people together across decades of time, across the cataclysms of history.

Neither of us got upset, nor in any way felt awkward. That was then, this was now. Besides, why judge each other for the transgressions and victimizations of relatives we are connected to only through blood, and circumstance? We live our own lives, accountable for our own actions.

We also had the luxury of not being at each other’s throats. Bougie people, leading bougie lives in America, we sat there eating a nice steak dinner. Unlike our ancestors a generation or so before in Europe, we didn’t have to fight a zero sum existential game that brought out the worst in everyone.

Instead we could witness and discuss the vagaries and vicissitudes of humanity with an impartial, rational eye. That gave us the objectivity and hindsight to free ourselves — and our families — of judgment. Ingrid felt no guilt as a Nazi descendant, and I felt no blame as an ascendant Jew.

Something subtle nonetheless changed between us. One second we were the beneficiaries of history, a moment later its victims. Although we didn’t have to pick sides and play by the old rules, the grim reminder of where we both came from made our relatively carefree lives feel petty, anticlimactic.

“How does it feel to be connected to history?” I asked. “Everyone’s got a past,” she replied, “and skeletons in their closet. Mine are Nazis. But at least I know who some of them are.” Indeed she did, knowing her family better than I did mine, probably because they were all murdered. Round it goes.

Tribal creatures, our judgment of and behavior toward others is usually deterministic. We rarely if ever acknowledge that the values and opinions we consider obvious and natural are the consequence of entirely random factors, most notably where, when, and to whom we were born.

A Chicagoan will be a Bears fan with as much zeal as a Detroiter will be a Lions fan — facts unencumbered by most members of both teams being non-native to their host cities, or by the arbitrariness of their respective fans happening to live where they do. Sports, like most things, is tribal.

Politics is similarly deterministic, expansive swaths of the country shading predominantly red or blue. Even in areas best described as purple, the main driver of an individual’s party affiliation is family, begging the question of choice. Most of us are born into who we are, what we believe.

History is equally stubborn, our tribal instincts fueling endless wars. Of course most Palestinians hate Israel; of course most Chinese support Uyghur oppression — how could they, and why would they, not? The essence of identity is based not only on who we are, but who we are not. Us vs. them.

And yet, humans also possess an innate desire for fairness, based on a moral standard that’s tough to pin down, but ubiquitously felt. Philosophers have debated the nature and application of ethics for millennia, ranging from the arbitrary to the absolute, no end in sight.

One thing’s for sure: we hope for a world where children need not suffer for the mistakes of their parents, and citizens, when forced to act, need not blindly follow the dictates of their leaders when those actions are considered reprehensible or evil. To that end, every steak dinner counts.