The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.
George Steiner
 From his base in Tel Aviv, Holocaust survivor Emmanuel Lieber directs a group of Jewish Nazi hunters in search of Adolf Hitler. Lieber believes that the former Führer is still alive and following rumours and hearsay, he tracks Hitler's movements through South America, until after months of wading through swamps in the Amazon jungle, the search party finds the 90-year-old alive in a clearing. Lieber flies to San Cristóbal where he awaits the group's return with their captive. But getting the old man out of the swamp alive is more difficult than getting in, and their progress is further hampered by heavy thunderstorms. Meanwhile, broken and incoherent radio messages between Lieber and the search party are intercepted by intelligence agents tracking their progress, and rumours begin to spread across the world of Hitler's capture. Debates flare up over his impending trial, where it will be held and under whose jurisdiction. Orosso is identified as the nearest airfield to the last known location of the search party, and aircraft begin arriving at the hitherto unknown town. But when the search party's radio fails and communication with Lieber is lost, they must make a decision: do they sit out the storms and deliver their captive to Lieber later, or do they try Hitler here and now in the jungle before their prize is snatched from them and Israel by the world at large, who they know will be waiting for them? Their decision is the latter, and against Lieber's advice ("You must not let him speak [...] his tongue is like no other") they prepare for a trial with a judge, prosecution and defence "attorneys" selected from the members of the search party. Teku, a local Indian tracker, who had earlier burst in on their camp, is asked to observe the trial as an independent witness. The attention Hitler is receiving, however, renews his strength, and when the trial begins, he brushes aside his "defence attorney" and begins a long speech in four parts in his own defence: #Firstly, Hitler claims he took his doctrines from the Jews and copied the notion of the master race from the Chosen people and their need to separate themselves from the "unclean". "My racism is a parody of yours, a hungry imitation." #Hitler justifies the Final Solution by maintaining that the Jews' God, purer than any other, enslaves its subjects, continually demanding more than they can give and "blackmailing" them with ideals that cannot be attained. The "virus of utopia" had to be stopped. #Hitler states that he was not the originator of evil. "[Stalin] had perfected genocide when I was still a nameless scribbler in Munich." Further, Hitler asserts that the number of lives lost due to his actions are dwarfed by various world atrocities, including those in Russia, China, and Africa. #Lastly, Hitler maintains that the Reich begat Israel and suggests that he is the Messiah "whose infamous deeds were allowed by God in order to bring His people home." He closes by asking, "Should you not honour me who have made [...] Zion a reality?" At the end of his speech, Teku is the first to react and jumps up shouting "Proven", only to be drowned out by the appearance of a helicopter over the clearing. *Emmanuel Lieber – Jewish Holocaust survivor and director of the search party to find Hitler; after crawling out of a death pit in Bialka he never took the time to mend and embarked on a life-consuming obsession to bring those responsible for the genocide to justice. *Search party (all Jewish with family ties to the Holocaust, except for John Asher) **Simeon – search party leader and "presiding judge" at Hitler's trial; he is Lieber's confidant and torn between leading the party into "unmapped quicksand and green bogs" and turning his back on the "quiet mania of Lieber's conviction". **Gideon Benasseraf – falls ill and dies before the trial begins; during one of his fever-induced ramblings he suggests that Hitler is Jewish; he had sought out Lieber after being released from a sanatorium and spending three years recuperating in Paris where the care-free living consumed him with guilt. **Elie Barach – Orthodox Jew and "prosecution attorney" at the trial; he is the moral compass of the group, but his convictions are disturbed by Gideon Benasseraf's fever-induced assertions that Hitler is Jewish and ends up believing that Hitler may be the second Messiah. **Isaac Amsel – an 18-year old boy and witness at the trial; **John Asher – half-Jewish and reluctant "defence attorney" at the trial; *Teku – local Indian tracker and independent witness at the trial; previously the search party's guide who had abandoned them when they insisted on entering uncharted regions of the jungle, he continued tracking them from a distance before revealing himself. *Adolf Hitler – now 90 years old, the former leader of the Third Reich had not died in the Führerbunker in Berlin, but escaped to South America and hid in the Amazon jungle.