ISRAELI FILMMAKER DISCOVERS TIES TO ADOLF EICHMANN IN CHILDHOOD HOMETOWN
Ramit Plushnick-Masti

AP Worldstream
Apr 24, 2006

When an Israeli filmmaker began researching his roots in Austria,
he made a shocking discovery: His brother had bought his bar mitzvah
suit at a clothing store owned by the family of future Nazi mastermind
Adolf Eichmann.

While making a new documentary, Micha Shagrir learned that his family
was closer to the Eichmanns than he ever imagined. There were business
ties, social acquaintances and mutual friendships in their neighborhood
of Linz, Austria.

Shagrir’s film, “Sight of Memory,” was being aired on Israeli
television Monday night, the eve of the country’s annual Holocaust
remembrance day. It also is being shown at a film festival in Linz
on Wednesday.

The 68-year-old Shagrir, whose parents fled Austria when he was a
baby, worked on the project for more than two years. The quest took
him to Bischof Strasse, the street where his family lived just four
doors down from the Eichmanns.

The family homes are still intact: No. 7, where he was born, and No.
3, where the Eichmanns lived. But their businesses are long gone.

Shagrir’s family owned a well-known candy factory, while Eichmann’s
father, Robert, ran an electronics store, and his mother had a
tailor shop.

Yet some of the neighbors remain. Shagrir was pleasantly surprised to
learn that the family factory _ Schwager Candies _ was something of a
town symbol. Shagrir’s family name was changed after moving to Israel.

“When I came to film on the street, people 80 and 70 years old passed
by,” Shagrir said. “Tears poured down their faces when they remembered
the candies and cookies they ate.”

Elderly people who still live on the street spoke easily of life
between the Eichmanns and the Jewish Schwager family. Such ties were
routine until the Holocaust.

Looking over town documents, Shagrir found a 1926 picture of his
grandfather being crowned president of Linz’s Jewish community.

Sitting four seats away, at a ceremony attended by about 100 of the
town’s VIPs, was Eichmann’s father, who as president of the Protestant
community was a natural ally of the Jewish leader.

“The closeness between them was understood because they were both
presidents of minority groups,” Shagrir said.

Shagrir was even more surprised to learn that his older half brother,
Haim Grunwald, bought clothes for his bar mitzvah _ a Jewish ritual
of entering adulthood _ from the Eichmann’s tailor shop. “He told me
his bar mitzvah jacket was bought there,” he said. Grunwald died two
months ago, just before the film was completed.

Most of the Schwager family survived the Holocaust by fleeing Austria
and Germany in the 1930s, narrowly escaping the systematic Nazi
extermination of six million Jews.

Eichmann, the SS leader who organized the mass murder of Jews, was
tracked to Argentina after World War II, abducted by Israeli agents
in 1960 and tried and hanged by Israel.

As part of his research, Shagrir had coffee and strudel with
Eichmann’s nephew, Hannes, and spoke on the telephone with the Nazi
killer’s youngest son, Ricardo, a professor of Mideast archaeology in
Berlin. Neither agreed to be filmed for the movie, but they expressed
personal sorrow for their relative’s actions, he said.

For Shagrir, going back to Austria was not just a professional
experience, but also the first time he confronted the roots he spent
most of his childhood hiding.

“When I was growing up, I didn’t say that I was born in Austria. It
wasn’t something to be proud of, especially coming from a city that
aside from me, Adolf Eichmann and Adolf Hitler were raised,” Shagrir
said in an interview at his cluttered Jerusalem home.

“On the eve of the establishment of the state of Israel, growing up
as someone who came from German culture _ classical music, singing _
it was shameful and embarrassing,” Shagrir said.

Shagrir is no stranger to controversy. He spent years studying
the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey between 1915-1923,
producing a movie in 1976 that set off a diplomatic tiff that almost
led Turkey to cut ties with Israel.

The 50-minute movie, which focused on Armenian folklore, music,
dancing and culture, included 45 seconds of footage from 1917 of
hundreds of Armenian bodies hanging from trees and inside ditches,
Shagrir said. Hours after the movie’s premier showing in Jerusalem,
he received an angry call from the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

Turkey, which is extremely sensitive to the Armenian killings
and insists the deaths were not a planned genocide, was demanding
Israel’s state-owned TV cancel a planned broadcast of the film,
Shagrir said. Israel TV later decided not to air the movie.

For Shagrir, the fact that Israel’s Holocaust memorial falls on
the same day as the 91st anniversary of the Armenian killings is
especially significant.

Yet Shagrir said he would like all of his films to teach future
generations that such incidents should not only be documented and
researched, but prevented at all costs.

“What does it matter if there are 1,000 people in a ditch, 100,000
or a million,” Shagrir said. “The message is that it is forbidden to
kill or expel people because of their beliefs.”