Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends - a book review

A book by Linda Kinstler whose mother is Jewish and father a Latvian.

She traveled to Riga to find out about her grandfather about whom nothing was known.

(snip)

In a bookstore in Riga, a chance discovery in a novel she’d grabbed from a wall display, made her blood run cold: The book was an ostensibly fictitious spy story about Herberts Cukurs, a real-life Latvian aviator of some renown who had belonged to a death-squad under wartime Nazi command. And in it, on the very first page, was a character who had her own grandfather’s name. “It is hard,” Ms. Kinstler writes, “to describe the sense of disorientation brought about by this encounter.”

(snip)

The book, Ms. Kinstler’s first, is an exquisite exploration into “how the memory of the Holocaust extends into the present and acts upon it,” as she puts it. Hers is a story of Latvia and of her own family—of Latvia’s demons and her family’s ghosts. Its title comes from the closing argument by Sir Hartley Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor, made at the Nuremberg trials in July 1946. “Mankind itself,” Shawcross had said, “ . . . comes to this Court and cries: ‘These are our laws—let them prevail!’ ” In Shawcross’s language, the verb “cry” is meant to stand for the act of saying something out loud, or exclaiming. Ms. Kinstler, for her part, uses it as a synonym for lamentation, for hers is a tale of “justice deferred, delayed, circumvented, undone.”

Specifically, justice is ultimately thwarted—as Ms. Kinstler tells it—in the case of Herberts Cukurs, known in his time as the “Latvian Lindbergh.” The “man in the sky” in that era was regarded as a superman, writes Ms. Kinstler. He stood for “order, achievement and exertion,” and for a new age of mankind. Cukurs was handsome and charming, not unlike the American celebrity with whom he drew comparison. And as with Charles Lindbergh, there was in Cukurs’s life an “entanglement of aviation and fascism.”

(snip)

It should be noted that “Come to This Court & Cry” is more about Cukurs than about Ms. Kinstler’s grandfather, who proves to be, disturbingly, a shadowy participant in Cukurs’s killing sprees. If Cukurs is known outside Latvia today, it is not for his aviation so much as for the fact that he’s the only war criminal who was executed—or murdered, if you prefer that word to describe an extrajudicial killing—by the Mossad. Cukurs and his family escaped after the war to Brazil, where he started a new life as an operator of tourist rides in São Paulo. He made no attempt to hide his identity, speaking freely to the local press. This attracted the attention of Jewish groups—and of Israel, which in 1964 sent an agent named Yaakov Meidad, who’d been part of the team that had abducted Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in May 1960, to befriend Cukurs and lure him to Uruguay. Meidad did this with ruthless beauty, courting Cukurs for months as a property dealer who could make the murderous Latvian rich.

The Israelis didn’t abduct Cukurs and take him to Israel to stand trial, as they’d done with Eichmann. Instead they killed him in Montevideo on Feb. 23, 1965, stuffing his corpse into a trunk and alerting the German press of its whereabouts. The coda to Shawcross’s Nuremberg argument, “These are our laws—let them prevail,” was left on a card on Cukurs’s body, a statement from his killers.

(snip)

Many in Latvia remain unconvinced that Cukurs could have done the things he is said to have done. The absence of a trial has raised, for some, a perverse presumption of innocence. The country’s prosecutor general exonerated him only three years ago after an investigation that might be called, at a minimum,

https://www.wsj.com/articles/come-to-this-court-and-cry-review-a-ghost-in-the-family-review-11660923735 (subscription)

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As I have mentioned here just a few months ago, I was in Montevideo when his body was found

https://www.democraticunderground.com/122311426#post1

https://www.jta.org/archive/nazi-involved-in-killing-jews-in-riga-found-dead-in-uruguay