Bascomb, Neil. Hunting Eichmann: How A Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi Criminal. Wilmington, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

I must confess I felt drawn to review Hunting Eichmann, for the same reason I have always been galvanized to read everything I can about the Holocaust and its genesis; it is nothing short of a compulsion; a perpetual search for understanding.I'm not certain when this began but I do have memories of watching grainy black and white footage of the liberation of the camps being shown to me while I was still a young school child living in a sleepy Long Island Jewish town where most of us had just arrived from Brooklyn.I couldn't erase those images from my mind; they became a template of sorts against which I measured other things.There was a code of silence about the Holocaust back then during the late 1950's and early 1960's; a seemingly conscious decision among the Jews I lived with to remain quiet, to turn our attention elsewhere.If someone had lost a relative "over there," we did not speak of it.My parents were already hopelessly smitten with the American dream which was then and still is today primarily a Gentile one.Conversations swirled around Kennedy and Camelot and Sinatra's demise, and there was a ridiculous amount of attention paid to the new fancy cars that let you roll the top down and gaze at the stars.But my gaze was always inward; dark thoughts consumed me about what had happened to the Jews.It is this sense of personal heartbreak that is missing from Neil Bascomb's suspense driven narrative about the hunt for Adolf Eichmann, the high ranking Nazi responsible for designing the concentration camps and transport systems required to bring millions of Jews to their deaths.Bascomb always remains the journalist, the storyteller, and the tireless researcher who does not allow himself to interject his own emotional responses or judgments or analysis into his work.He doesn't even attempt to tackle the larger questions about anti-Semitism that his impeccable research uncovers.He never enters the story and keeps his lens pointed and narrow, and the book suffers from his reticence.Using information from newly released classified documents, Bascomb reconstructs for us Eichman's capture by Mossad agents, his trial and eventual hanging, and the unbelievable circumstances that led to finding him.Eichmann escaped after the war and had been living for years in Argentina with his wife and sons.He had managed to secure for himself a new identity and went under the pseudonym Ricardo Klement.In an inexplicable act of stupidity and arrogance, he permitted his sons to keep the Eichmann name.When the eldest Eichmann boy ate dinner at his girlfriend's house and began spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric, the girl's father Lothar Hermann, a half-Jew who had escaped from Europe with his Gentile wife, became suspicious that the young man was the son of Adolf Eichmann.He became more alarmed when his daughter told him that she was never allowed to visit her boyfriend's home and that he always insisted they meet at a mutual friend's house.It was this tip by Lothar Hermann that led to the capture of Eichmann.

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