Chap­ter 1 opens with an intro­duc­tion to Howard W. Camp­bell, Jr., a man caught in a web of con­tra­dic­tions, being an Amer­i­can by birth but tied to the Nazi regime by his actions dur­ing the Sec­ond World War. In 1961, Camp­bell finds him­self impris­oned in a mod­ern Jerusalem jail, where he writes to Mr. Tuvia Fried­mann, the Direc­tor of the Haifa Insti­tute for the Doc­u­men­ta­tion of War Crim­i­nals. Fried­mann, intrigued by Campbell’s past as a sus­pect­ed war crim­i­nal, has shown an unex­pect­ed kind­ness by offer­ing him a type­writer, one bear­ing the S.S. sym­bol, a chill­ing reminder of the dark peri­od in his­to­ry that Camp­bell was once deeply involved in. As Camp­bell writes, he reflects on the irony of receiv­ing such sup­port in his cur­rent posi­tion, as a man now iso­lat­ed from his for­mer life and sur­round­ed by the mem­o­ries of atroc­i­ties he once played a part in.

As Camp­bell reflects on the weight of his sur­round­ings, he becomes acute­ly aware of the ancient stones that make up his prison cell, some dat­ing back to the time of King Solomon. These cen­turies-old stones serve as a silent reminder of how far removed he is from the world he once knew, high­light­ing the vast span of his­to­ry that has passed since his actions dur­ing the war. His mind also dwells on the chang­ing per­spec­tives of the younger gen­er­a­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly Arnold Marx, his young guard. Arnold, a mere eigh­teen years old, knows lit­tle of the hor­rors of the Sec­ond World War, as it end­ed long before his birth. For him, the war is mere­ly a dis­tant his­tor­i­cal event, one he under­stands through text­books and lec­tures rather than the lived expe­ri­ences of those who sur­vived it. Arnold’s ambi­tions lie in more con­tem­po­rary pur­suits, like law and archae­ol­o­gy, with a spe­cial inter­est in exca­vat­ing Hazor, an ancient site rich in his­tor­i­cal impor­tance. This gen­er­a­tional divide between Arnold’s youth­ful enthu­si­asm for the past and Campbell’s heavy bur­den of guilt over his involve­ment in a cat­a­stroph­ic war cre­ates a stark con­trast between the two men.

The con­ver­sa­tion between Arnold and Camp­bell serves to high­light the vast dif­fer­ences in their under­stand­ing of his­to­ry. While Arnold’s life is filled with the study of ancient civ­i­liza­tions, Campbell’s exis­tence is dom­i­nat­ed by the moral weight of his wartime deci­sions and the after­math of his actions. When Arnold men­tions Hazor’s destruc­tion by the Assyr­i­an king Tiglath-Pileser III, Camp­bell is struck by the men­tion of vio­lence that occurred long before his own time, yet still seems to rever­ber­ate in his own life. The name Tiglath-Pileser III is not some­thing Camp­bell read­i­ly recalls, but it trig­gers with­in him a sense of his­tor­i­cal con­ti­nu­ity, con­nect­ing ancient vio­lence to the atroc­i­ties of the 20th cen­tu­ry, and, by exten­sion, to his own actions. Arnold speaks casu­al­ly about the his­tor­i­cal events that have shaped the ancient world, but for Camp­bell, these events serve as painful reminders of the vio­lence and destruc­tion that have been a con­stant thread through­out human his­to­ry. This exchange serves to deep­en Campbell’s inter­nal con­flict as he con­tem­plates the cycli­cal nature of vio­lence and how it has affect­ed both the past and the present. As Arnold remains untouched by the emo­tion­al and moral ram­i­fi­ca­tions of the past, Camp­bell is left to wres­tle with the bur­den of his own role in his­to­ry, ques­tion­ing how much of the past can ever tru­ly be erased and how much of it will always linger. The con­ver­sa­tion between them also high­lights how the pas­sage of time can shape per­spec­tives, leav­ing one gen­er­a­tion to dwell in the shad­ows of the past while the next looks to the future with hope and curios­i­ty.