‘Finale’ curator happy to see espionage tale shared as film

for a trial. The televised trial was the first ever; it captivated millions worldwide and allowed many Holocaust survivors to tell their stories for the first time — long after World War II.

Avraham said by phone recently that he was gratified by the film and the audience reaction.

“It’s not a documentary, but this is a way to tell the story of the Holocaust for people who don’t want to hear about the Holocaust,” Avraham said. “People don’t wake up and say, ‘What a lovely day — let’s go to the Holocaust Museum.’ But they go to the cinema to see the wonderful Ben Kingsley playing Eichmann. And maybe they will remember something and maybe they will read about it and maybe take their kids to the nearest Holocaust museum.”

Making an entertaining spy movie, he said, is “like medicine inside a candy.”

Oscar winner Kingsley’s performance, in particular, drew high praise from Avraham, 53, who retired from Mossad three years ago and now works on the exhibit and is writing a book.

“It’s very easy to say Eichmann was a monster,” Avraham said. “But he was a regular human. He’s got four kids, a family — he built a home for them, just like the other Nazis who believed in something and made evil things.

“Some people say the movie humanizes Eichmann, but he was a human being. That’s the whole idea.”

Avraham gave filmmakers a real wrist tattoo number from a Holocaust survivor from Hungary when one of the actors shows an Auschwitz concentration-camp tattoo. He also advised them on the names of the many airlines stamped on the spies’ luggage and showed them how agents swapped a photo of Eichmann onto a fake passport used to get him out of Argentina.

He also took potatoes to the set for a scene making fake passports. Forgers would cut a fresh potato in half and use it to transfer a stamp from one passport to another.

“If you look carefully,” Avraham said, “you’ll see one of the potatoes I put out there.”

The “Operation Finale” exhibit, he said, uses photographs, film and declassified spy artifacts. It has visited Cleveland, Illinois and New York, and it is booked for the next three years at museums nationwide.