What of the men who operated and policed the death camps, who closed the doors on the gas chambers, who administered the pellets of lethal Zyklon B? What of those who manned the ghettos or drove the trains, those who used rifle butts to herd batch after batch of Jews towards vast pits dug from the earth, first stripping them naked, then shooting them in the back, under strict orders to use no more than one bullet per victim, so that many of those who fell into the pits were not yet dead but buried alive - so that witnesses later spoke of the pits seeming to move and writhe, to breathe, for days afterwards? What of those guilty men? And it takes more than 24 people to kill six million.
There were some, at the very top of the Nazi state, who were famously called to account at the Nuremberg trials. Of course, "no one" is not literally true. The dirty little secret of the Holocaust, which many would regard as the greatest crime in human history, is that no one was punished for it. This fact is shocking, even if it is hardly new, and the story it triggered is stunning: a tale of heroism and violence, a burning quest for justice and revenge that reads more like ancient legend than contemporary history.įirst the fact. The key facts are in place, as thoroughly documented as any event in human history: the Nazis wanted to rid the world of Jews and, through both mass shootings and gas chambers, they succeeded in murdering six million of them, including more than a million children.Īnd yet there is at least one aspect of the Holocaust that has barely registered on the world's consciousness, a remarkable fact - and, causally connected to it, an extraordinary story. There was a surge of fresh information when the Soviet records were opened up after 1991, but there is no further comparable cache of papers waiting to be mined. And it's true that, as that event slips from memory into history and the remaining survivors enter their last years, the flow of new revelations about the Nazi campaign to eradicate the Jews has slowed to a trickle.
#Family sought revenge against tormentor. they full#
After more than six decades, with libraries full of books, archives packed with testimony and warehouses crammed with documents, you might think we know all there is to know about the Holocaust.
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