What Does Evil Look Like?

‘Look within to understand the evil of others.’ It was in the courtroom that Yehiel De-Nur saw the accused for the first time. The man's appearance caused De-Nur to shake uncontrollably and then faint upon the floor. The accused had been living in Argentina as a fugitive, working as a department head at Mercedes Benz. After carefully monitoring his daily routine for days, members of Israel’s intelligence agency finally made their move on May 11, 1960. He had just gotten off a bus after work near his home when he was forced into a car and smuggled out of the country to stand trial in Israel for being one of the architects behind the murder of over six million people. His name was Adolf Eichmann. He had essentially been the logistical mastermind behind the killing apparatus of the Holocaust. A bureaucrat who had sat comfortably behind a government desk every day making sure that the trains running to and from the death camps ran on schedule. At the trial, Yehiel De-Nur was one of many called to testify against Eichmann. He was a Holocaust survivor who had spent 2 horrifying years at Auschwitz. So what caused him to faint upon the courtroom floor when seeing Eichmann for the first time? Hatred? Fear? Haunting memories? In an interview on 60 Minutes, aired in 1983, De-Nur recounted that he had been expecting to see a sinister, god-like army officer sitting in the prisoners box. Instead, he saw a very ordinary looking man in a suit. Someone who he could have easily passed by on the way to the courthouse without giving a second thought. In other words, Eichmann didn’t ‘look’ evil. He just looked like everyone else. He looked...like De-Nur himself. With that, De-Nur was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that he was fully capable of doing the exact same things that Eichmann did. You see, dear reader, evil doesn’t just strut through the warped minds of the powerful. It crawls and slithers through the gutters of everyone’s heart. Eichmann lives in all of us. Please don’t forget to like and share this post.