Below is an excerpt taken from one of the audio lessons in Charlie Clough's Biblical Framework Series. Charlie is talking about the Adolf Eichmann Trial. He's relaying a story told in Chuck Colson's book The Body.
He tells a story of a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz who was an elderly man who was brought into the courtroom when Adolf Eichmann was there. Eichmann had been hijacked out of Argentina by the Israeli Mossad, they captured him and brought him to Israel for trial for his crimes at Auschwitz, and here was the grand day of the trial and Eichmann was seated with the Israeli police behind a bulletproof glass in the courtroom. They called for the witness because here in the formal Jewish strict justice system they had to have an eyewitness to the murders. So in comes this man, I think he was an American citizen who went in, a very elderly man, and he walks into the courtroom, and he looks through that glass panel at Adolf Eichmann. What happened next was an amazing thing - he suddenly collapsed and lay screaming on the floor. He was later interviewed, I think by Mike Wallace, and the interviewer asked this man why he reacted that way, was he terrified, did Eichmann's presence remind him of the awfulness of that slaughter?
He said, "No, it wasn't that at all." He said, "I walked into that courtroom and all the years of my life, ever since I was a little child in Auschwitz I conceived of those Nazis as monster people, and that day when I walked into the courtroom and I looked through the glass he was a normal person, like me, and it dawned on me, he said, that anyone of us could do what he did. And that's what terrified me, I collapsed on the floor in terror of the power of evil."
Isn't that a dramatic story, and how Biblical. Because it shows us that any person could have been an Eichmann, ANY person ... but for the grace of God.
