Adolf Eichmann was remembered by one generation as a balding man sitting behind a glass screen in an Israeli court, having been kidnapped and flown to Jerusalem. His trial played its part in stirring old memories, in urging those who had remained silent to speak. Another generation remembered him in his prime. He was the man who had planned and executed genocide. He arrived in Budapest in March, 1944, and within weeks had arranged for the deportation and slaughter of four hundred thousand Jews. The operation was efficient, systematic and it swept up a young boy and his family, one family among many, and carried them to Auschwitz. To Eichmann, such people were invisible beyond numbers in a ledger. Their removal and extinction was a task that he carried out with rigour and a certain pride in his own effectiveness. That boy, however, had a name. He was Elie Wiesel.

‘If there is a single theme that dominates all my writings, all my obsessions’, wrote Elie Wiesel, born in September 1928 and fifteen therefore when his world collapsed, ‘it is that of memory – because I fear forgetfulness as much as hatred and death. To forget is, for a Jew, to deny his people – and all that it symbolizes – and also to deny himself.’ It is not simply a question of remembering the events of the Holocaust. He insists that the Jew should remember 'that you were a slave in Egypt.