I watched the 1978 Holocaust mini-series again today.
I read and reread and watch and re-watch the Holocaust literature,
documentaries and movies, whenever I get time. Yes, watching those images is excruciatingly
painful, but is a must (and should be must for every adult).
And it coincided with a brilliant article on the Holocaust I
chanced upon while doing some random scrolling down of my Facebook feed.
Obviously, it had to be brilliant, extensive, in-depth and
engaging like a one-sit reading, as it was a The New Yorker piece.
‘The Last Trial: A Great-grandmother, Auschwitz and the Arc ofJustice’, an article spread over 6000 words, written by Elizabeth Kolbert, a
staff writer with The New Yorker, traces the German legal process on the Holocaust
through notable criminal trials, her discovery of messages by her
great-grandmother from Berlin to her grandfather in the United States and her
decision to join Stolpersteine, a public art project by German artist Gunter
Demnig to memorialize the Holocaust victims.
A Stolpersteine has details of a Holocaust victim on a brass
plaque fixed on a concrete block. It is fixed at the last known address of a
person before he/she was deported to a death camp and the project has spread well
beyond Germany to other European countries with generations perished in the
Nazi gas chambers.
Through these events, Elizabeth Kolbert weaves an engaging analysis
of the German attitude on trying Nazi war criminals legally.
She begins with Oskar Groning, a former SS member, known as ‘the bookkeeper
of Auschwitz’, who doubled up as a guard. Now 94, Groning is set to face trial
in April for ‘being an accessory to murder of 300,000 people’ and explores the
changing German attitude on Nazi atrocities, from a generation that took little
interest in prosecuting those responsible for running the extermination camps and
instead found legal ways to safeguard them, to the generation now that has put Oskar
Groning on trial, after decades of settled public life.
Hundreds of thousands were involved in running some 300
concentration camps of Adolf Hitler, camps that did overtime to double as
extermination camps, to achieve the ‘Final Solution’, of annihilating Jews. And
just a handful of them were seriously tried for their crimes, the crimes for
which there cannot be any forgiveness.
This article a must-read for everyone who cares for what happened in
Germany and German occupied territories seven decades ago and what followed
after it.
Thanks Elizabeth Kolbert.