Come to This Court and Cry
How the Holocaust Ends
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
In 1965, five years after the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, one of his Mossad abductors was sent back to South America to kill another fugitive Nazi, the so-called “butcher of Riga,” Latvian Herberts Cukurs. Cukurs was shot. On his corpse, the assassins left pages from the closing speech of the chief British prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg:
“After this ordeal to which mankind has been submitted, mankind itself . . . comes to this Court and cries: ‘These are our laws—let them prevail!’”
Years later, the Latvian prosecutor general began investigating the possibility of redeeming Cukurs for his past actions. Researching the case, Linda Kinstler discovered that her grandfather, Boris, had served in Cukurs’s killing unit and was rumored to be a double agent for the KGB. The proceedings, which might have resulted in Cukurs’s pardon, threw into question supposed “facts” about the Holocaust at the precise moment its last living survivors—the last legal witnesses—were dying.
Rich with scholarly detective work and personal reflection, Come to This Court and Cry is a fearlessly brave examination of how history can become distorted over time, how easily the innocent are forgotten, and how carelessly the guilty are sometimes reprieved.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Kinstler debuts with a captivating investigation into "how the memory of the Holocaust extends into the present and acts upon it." After the Nazis invaded Latvia in 1941, Kinstler's paternal grandfather, Boris Kinstler, joined the Arajs Kommando, a Latvian police unit tasked with ridding the region of communists and Jews. In 1949, Boris disappeared from Latvia and was reported dead by Soviet authorities, fueling rumors that he'd been a KGB agent "charged with killing Latvian partisans." Interwoven with Boris's story is that of Herberts Cukurs, a famed Latvian aviator who also joined the Arajs Kommandos and was accused by eyewitnesses of participating in the Rumbula massacre. After escaping Allied authorities and settling in Brazil, Cukurs was assassinated by Mossad agents in 1965. Forty years later, the Latvian government opened an investigation into Cukurs that concluded there was "no evidence" he had taken part in "acts that qualify as genocide." Though the links between Boris and Cukurs—which were first suggested to the author by a "cheap" Latvian spy novel that claims her grandfather was responsible for Cukurs's fate—feel somewhat tenuous, Kinstler lucidly analyses the legal, cultural, and political matters involved. The result is a fascinating and often troubling account of how the past haunts the present.
