11/30/2023 0 Comments The storyteller![]() Also, as of 2007, if you commit genocide anywhere in the world and hide out in the US, we can prosecute. As of 2007 we can now prosecute an act of terrorism against an American elsewhere in the world. Until 2007, in fact, the US Genocide statute only covered genocides perpetrated by US citizens against US citizens within the US – basically, Custer’s Last Stand. ![]() I did not realize that the US does not have the ability to prosecute Nazis found within its borders. When law enforcement professionals surrounded his house, he came outside and looked at the guns and said, “Why you shoot? I not Jew.” Seventy years may have passed, but prejudice is alive and well. ![]() Years ago, after extensive work, his department finally was ready to question an elderly man who had been a Nazi guard and who was now living in the Midwest. Lest you wonder why this topic is still important, even after nearly 70 years – here’s a story he told me. I also had the pleasure of interviewing the director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy in the Human Rights & Special Prosecutions section of the Department of Justice – a real-life Nazi hunter. At Bergen Belsen, she slept in a barrack with 900 people and contracted typhoid – and would have died, if the British had not come then to liberate them. Or Mania, whose mastery of the German language saved her life multiple times during the war, when she was picked to work in office jobs instead of in hard labor and who told me of Herr Baker, her German boss at one factory, who called the young Jewish women who were assigned to him Meine Kinder (my children) and who saved his workers from being selected by the Nazis during a concentration camp roundup. Or how his mother promised him that he would not be shot in the head, only the chest – can you imagine making that promise to your child?! Or Gerda – who won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and who survived a 350 mile march in January 1945 – because, she told me, her father had told her to wear her ski boots when she was taken from home. Some of the moments these brave men and women told me will stay with me forever: such as Bernie, who pried a mezuzah from his door frame as the Nazis dragged him from his home, and held it curled in his fist throughout the entire war – so that it took two years to straighten his fingers after liberation. It was humbling and horrifying to realize that the stories they recounted were non-fiction. Some of those details went into the fictional history of my character, Minka. I met with several Holocaust survivors, who told me their stories. Naturally, this research was among some of the most emotionally grueling I’ve ever done. The moral conundrum in which Wiesenthal found himself has been the starting point for many philosophical and moral analyses about the dynamics between victims of genocide and the perpetrators…and it got me thinking about what would happen if the same request was made, decades later, to a Jewish prisoner’s granddaughter. Wiesenthal recounts a moment when, as a concentration camp prisoner, he was brought to the bedside of a dying Nazi, who wanted to confess to and be forgiven by a Jew. This book actually began with another book – Simon Wiesenthal’s THE SUNFLOWER. In this searingly honest novel, Jodi Picoult gracefully explores the lengths we will go in order to protect our families and to keep the past from dictating the future. When does a moral choice become a moral imperative? And where does one draw the line between punishment and justice, forgiveness and mercy? With her own identity suddenly challenged, and the integrity of the closest friend she’s ever had clouded, Sage begins to question the assumptions and expectations she’s made about her life and her family. If she says yes, she faces not only moral repercussions, but potentially legal ones as well. Despite their differences, they see in each other the hidden scars that others can’t, and they become companions.Įverything changes on the day that Josef confesses a long-buried and shameful secret-one that nobody else in town would ever suspect-and asks Sage for an extraordinary favor. When Josef Weber, an elderly man in Sage’s grief support group, begins stopping by the bakery, they strike up an unlikely friendship. She works through the night, preparing the day’s breads and pastries, trying to escape a reality of loneliness, bad memories, and the shadow of her mother’s death.
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