Why should we care?

The Jerusalem Post
By Yehuda Bauer
December 28, 2010

This country has right to deny entry, insist on departure of economic migrants but it cannot turn its back on those escaping genocide.

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Holocaust and Genocide Articles

The Holocaust's Uneasy Relationship With Literature
The Atlantic
By Menachem Kaiser

Literature and the Holocaust have a complicated relationship. This isn't to say, of course, that the pairing isn't a fruitful one--the Holocaust has influenced, if not defined, nearly every Jewish writer since, from Saul Bellow to Jonathan Safran Foer, and many non-Jews besides, like W.G. Sebald and Jorge Semprun. Still, literature qua art--innately concerned with representation and appropriation--seemingly stands opposed to the immutability of the Holocaust and our oversized obligations to its memory.

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The Beleaguered Cambodians
The New York Review of Books
By Margo Picken

More than thirty years after an estimated two million people died at the hands of Pol Pot's regime of Democratic Kampuchea, trials of senior Khmer Rouge leaders and those most responsible for the deaths are at last taking place in Cambodia. On July 26, the first to be tried, Kaing Guek Eav, commonly known as Duch, was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity--a sentence that he and the prosecution have since appealed. Duch directed Security Prison 21, also known as Tuol Sleng, where at least 14,000 prisoners, mostly Khmer Rouge cadres and officials, were tortured and killed.

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Holocaust and Genocide News

Monday, December 27, 2010

Holocaust art endures at Israel's Yad Vashem museum

With a 10,000-piece Holocaust-era collection and growing, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem leads the effort to conserve and display works by persecuted artists.

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Maintaining the memories of genocide

The late J. Michael Hagopian escaped the mass murder that claimed the lives of as many as 1.5 million Armenians. Through his 12 films, the atrocity will remain visible to all who are willing to see.

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Time runs out on US Armenian genocide resolution

By DESMOND BUTLER
The Associated Press
Wednesday, December 22, 2010; 7:46 PM

WASHINGTON -- U.S. lawmakers have avoided a diplomatic clash with important ally Turkey by deciding not to take up a resolution declaring the mass killings of Armenians early last century a genocide.


Supporters of the resolution made a push for approval in the final days of Congress, despite opposition from the Obama administration.
The measure was strongly opposed by Turkey and the administration feared it would have damaged relations with the NATO ally.
The House of Representatives ended its two-year term Wednesday without taking up the matter. It is unlikely to be passed when Republicans take control of the chamber in January because the new House speaker, John Boehner, opposes it.
Learn more about the Armenian Genocide by visiting the CHGS Armenian Genocide web page.
Watch the award-winning and Emmy-nominated television production "The Armenian Genocide: 90Years Later," produced by CHGS and Twin Cities Public Television on the TPT Video Vault. You may also access the link by visiting the CHGS Armenian Genocide or Web Links pages.

WWII resistance fighter Rochelle Sutin, 86

By HERÓN MÁRQUEZ ESTRADA, Star Tribune
December 20, 2010

Rochelle Sutin, a Holocaust survivor whose fight against the Nazis during World War II became the stuff of legend, died in a St. Louis Park nursing home Sunday.
Sutin, 86, had recently had a stroke, said her daughter, Cecilia Dobrin.

"She was a hero," Dobrin said of her mother, whose life was captured in a book and a play and told numerous times through speeches and articles about her and her husband, Jack Sutin. "She lived her entire life with great courage. She will be greatly missed by everyone who knew her and loved her. But her spirit will live forever in our hearts and minds. "


Rochelle Sutin was born and raised in the town of Stolpce in pre-war Poland, in a part of Eastern Europe that is now part of Belarus.
At the age of 16, after being captured by the invading Nazi forces and seeing dozens of relatives killed, she escaped into the woods to join the resistance movement in the area. In the Polish woods she met Jack Sutin.
The two spent years fighting the Nazis and caring for one another despite the deprivation, terror and constant threat of death.
"We were in love for 68 years," Jack Sutin said Sunday night. "She was a wonderful woman. When I was in the underground I was very sick and she took care of me. I am alive today because of her."
The couple married on Dec. 31, 1942, in an underground bunker in the middle of the war.
After the war, the couple were taken to a displaced persons camp in Germany, living there before migrating to the United States, where they joined an uncle of Rochelle Sutin's in St. Paul in 1949.
The couple started an import business a few years later, Rochelle, Inc. They ran it for a number of years, into the 1970s with Rochelle Sutin serving as vice president.
Cecilia Sutin said the company was very successful, having as clients a number of Fortune 500 companies.
Cecilia Dobrin said the difficulties her mother endured growing up gave her a greater appreciation for family and the successes of her life.
"She knew how easily it could be taken away," Dobrin said. "But she was not bitter. She [and my father] knew that the best revenge was to be happy and have a family."
The Sutins were forthright in sharing their life stories with their two children. In fact, Cecilia, now 63, was born in the displaced persons camp.
"It was a natural thing," Dobrin said. "Like any parent would tell their child about their history."
In 1995, the Sutin story went public. The couple's son, Larry, published a book about their exploits. "Jack and Rochelle: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance" gained international acclaim.
Rochelle Sutin is survived by her husband, Jack, of St. Louis Park; two children, Cecilia of Minnetonka and Larry of Edina; three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Services will be held at 1 p.m. Tuesday in Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minnetonka. Burial will follow at Adath Yeshurun cemetery in Edina.
Heron Marquez • 952-707-9994
For more on Rochelle visit her and Jack's web page on the CHGS site.

Holocaust and Genocide News

Monday, December 20, 2010

US lawmakers may vote on Armenian genocide measure

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House may vote next week on a measure that could damage U.S. relations with critical ally Turkey: a resolution declaring the World War I-era killings of Armenians a genocide.

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Will Focusing On Southern Sudan Prevent Genocide?

After the Holocaust, the world pledged "never again," but mass killings continued in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans and -- most recently -- Sudan's Darfur region.

U.S. officials see a new risk of blood-shed in next month's independence vote in Southern Sudan. This time, everyone from celebrities to U.S. diplomats is trying a new approach: Drawing attention to the risk of mass violence in hopes of preventing it.

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"Alternative Narratives or Denial?"

The 'Jew' of cinema

Haaretz
December 17, 2010
By Ariel Schweitzer

The recent announcement that filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's is to receive an honorary Oscar has ignited the controversy over his allegedly anti-Semitic and anti-American views, and his unwillingness to see the Jews in any position but that of the victim.

Professor Philip Watts from Columbia University will speak in April about Godard, WWII, the Jews and the Holocaust at CHGS's lecture series, "Alternative Narratives or Denial?" Professor Watts will examine portions of Godard's work and discuss how his history may have shaped and informed his cinematographic choices which have led to the anti-Semitic charges. More information about the lecture series coming in January.

The brouhaha that erupted in the United States and France recently over the decision to grant Jean-Luc Godard an honorary Academy Award - replete with accusations that Godard is anti-American, anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic - marks a new climax in the film director's convoluted relationship with American culture, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and with Jewish issues.
These fraught relations have been characterized by misunderstandings and confusion with respect to political critique and to philosophical and metaphysical questions, responsibility for which lies with both Godard and critics who have interpreted his work over the years.
Godard, who turned 80 this month, was not always critical of American culture and politics. Like many members of his generation who witnessed Europe's liberation by U.S. armed forces, he was exposed to the plethora of movies, jazz and other elements of American popular culture that flooded the continent after the war. At the time, the United States was seen as a young, dynamic nation, in contrast to the conservative, staid European society, which had been "tarnished" in moral terms by World War II. As a critic for the magazine Cahiers du cinema, Godard extolled American film and saw its great creators - Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Howard Hawks - as "auteurs" even before they were recognized as such in the States.
Moreover, Godard's early films, like those of many of his fellow directors of the French New Wave, were homages to American cinema. "Breathless," his first feature-length film, in 1959, is a variation on American gangster movies; 1961's "Une femme est une femme" is a direct reference to musical comedy.
This viewpoint began to change with the politicization of Godard's cinema in the mid-1960s. In films such as "Pierrot le fou" (1965 ), "2 or 3 Things I Know About Her" (1967), and "Week End" (1967 ), Godard mapped modern consumer society by means of its array of symbols. His criticism was directed at the time not only at French society, but also at the United States, cradle of the capitalist system, which he accused of economic and cultural imperialism.
In 1967 Godard also directed a segment in the collaborative film "Far from Vietnam," which slammed America's military involvement beyond its borders. This work heralded his abandonment of traditional cinema, the notion of the director as "auteur," and a decision to work from then on outside the established industry.
After the riots between students, workers and police in Paris in May '68, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, a political activist with a Marxist orientation, founded a political film collective named after the Soviet director Dziga Vertov. In this framework, Godard had directed some 10 films by 1972. One of the topics he dealt with was the Third World and his struggle against Western imperialism. This was also the moment when Israel entered his oeuvre - as America's representative in the Middle East and the oppressor of the Palestinians, whom Godard identified with the Third World and with his support for liberation and independence.
In 1970, Groupe Dziga Vertov, with funding from by the Arab League, went to Jordan to shoot a pro-Palestinian propaganda film called "Until Victory." They spent several weeks following the training of Palestinian guerrillas. Godard returned to France with the footage (shot in 16mm ) and embarked on the editing. But then came news of the Black September events, in which the army of Jordan's King Hussein massacred thousands of Palestinians (including many who had been filmed by Groupe Dziga Vertov ), in order to prevent a Palestinian takeover of the Hashemite kingdom.
The shocked Godard realized that he might be lacking a sufficient understanding of the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and inter-Arab relations and decided to abandon the film. In 1974, however, he incorporated footage from it into a new film, which he edited with video technology for the first time. In this work, "Ici et ailleurs" ("Here and Elsewhere" ), Godard looked at how Third World struggles are perceived in France and how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could serve to illuminate problems of class relations, coercion and exploitation in the Western world. It includes an outrageous visual analogy between the figures of Golda Meir and Hitler (to a soundtrack of the Kaddish prayer being recited for victims of the Holocaust ) - an image whose meaning is difficult to mistake: The Jew, erstwhile victim, is seen as the oppressor of the Palestinians. That image, which in the 1970s barely caused a stir (also because of the film's limited distribution ), over time became a sort of black hole, "absorbing" all the claims of those who consider Godard to be an anti-Semite.
In fact, the first to detect such feelings in Godard was actually Francois Truffaut, his close friend from the French New Wave period during the 1960s. In 1973, in a sharp letter that spelled the end of their friendship (and which became public only in 1988 , after Truffaut's death), Truffaut mentioned that Godard used to call his producer, Pierre Braunberger, a "filthy Jew." Truffaut also mocked Godard's militant political views: "After all, those who called you a genius, no matter what you did, all belonged to that famous trendy left. But you - you're the Ursula Andress of militancy; you make a brief appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash. You make two or three duly startling remarks and then you disappear again, trailing clouds of self-serving mystery."
Focus on the Holocaust
In the '80s Godard's preoccupation with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict expanded into a metaphysical discussion of the Jewish question, and the Holocaust became a central theme in his work. He drew upon the teachings of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who held that the emergence of the death camps was the formative event of the 20th century, and that the crisis in Western society, epitomized by Auschwitz, was also reflected in the concurrent birth of modern cinema.
In this spirit, Godard dealt almost obsessively with the experience of the camps. In his "Histoire(s) du cinema" (1989), he relates to cinema's treachery in serving the propagandist machinery of the Third Reich, although he also mentions that cinema "saved the honor of reality" by documenting the atrocities of the war as soon as the Nazi camps were liberated. He expressed an identification with the fate of the Jewish people, and even proclaimed himself "juif du cinema" - reflecting the sentiment that he was persecuted and banned from his home, indeed from his continent, and sentenced to perpetual exile. (In his letter, Truffaut also mocked Godard's tendency to present himself as a victim, even early on in his career. )
In this connection Godard resorted to certain analogies that began to arouse discomfort, to say the least. In the 1995 audiovisual essay "JLG/JLG - autoportrait de decembre," he dealt with the figure of the "Musulman," the living dead of the concentration camps, and emphasized that the root of that word is "Muslim." In view of his preoccupation with the Palestinian tragedy, that statement was once again interpreted as an effort to make an analogy between the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust and that of the Palestinians under the Israeli occupation.
Godard never confirmed such interpretations. He generally tends to present his oeuvre as poetic, associative art, but it is precisely this poetic quality that leaves his films open to interpretation and misunderstanding. What can be seen as the filmmaker's legitimate criticism of the Israeli occupation and his support for the Palestinians' struggle for freedom and independence (which he was among the first movie directors to take an interest in ) lose their validity when Godard equates - even if obliquely - the fate of the Palestinians with the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust. The Palestinian tragedy is serious enough and does not need the "support" of such comparisons, which detract from consideration of the specific, political nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and even spill over into the amorphous and fraught territory of theology and myth.
Moreover, it seems that in recent years Godard has been making deliberate use of provocation in order to stay in the headlines at a time when his films no longer resonate with a wide audience. His latest effort, "Filme socialisme," which came out this year and was seen in France by only 25,000 people, decries the death of the socialist utopia in the Europe of the third millennium, portrayed as a continent in crisis, which celebrates its decline as in the last days of Pompeii. The setting of the film, and its main metaphor is a pleasure boat that cruises between Mediterranean cities. Among the passengers is a Jewish capitalist, Goldberg, whose name Godard takes the trouble of translating literally into French as "gold mountain."
About a year before the film came out, Le Monde ran a long piece on the Jewish themes in Godard's work, which included testimony from Alain Fleischer which provoked a huge controversy in France. Fleischer, who directed the film "Fragments of Conversations with Jean-Luc Godard" (2007 ), said the Godard equated Palestinian suicide bombers with Jews who "sacrificed" themselves in the gas chambers in the name of the establishment of the State of Israel. Godard has never confirmed this, but he has also, as is quite typical, never denied it.
No middle ground
Godard is without a doubt anti-Zionist, but moreover he instills his political vision with a metaphysical dimension of the sort that is incapable of accepting the figure of the Jew as anything but a victim. In the filmmaker's view, the moment we are talking about a Jew who is an Israeli - and thus someone who no longer can claim to be a victim, per se - he necessarily becomes an executioner. Between the extremes of victim and executioner there is no middle ground, of the kind that would illuminate the political conflict from a slightly more complex perspective.
In a similar way, throughout his career, Godard developed an ideal, utopian image of Diaspora Judaism as universal, humane and spiritual, and an image of Zionism - and by implication, Israeliness - as isolationist, self-absorbed and aggressive. This dichotomy, which is at the heart of Godard's rejection of Jewish nationalism, ignores the fact that Zionism, at least at its inception, drew its inspiration in the late 19th century from the universal and modern ideas of the Enlightenment (that is, normalization of the Jewish condition, national liberation, socialism and humanism ), whereas during many chapters in its history, Diaspora Judaism was (and to a certain extent is still today ) characterized by community, if not isolationism.
Godard's obsession with Jewish matters was given riveting expression in his film "Notre musique" (2004 ). In the film, a Haaretz correspondent (played by Sarah Adler ) comes to Sarajevo to interview the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (played by the late poet himself ). Darwish tells her that the Palestinians are lucky that their conflict is with the Jews, since the world takes an ongoing interest in the Jews and thus is also interested in the fate of the Palestinians. "You handed us a defeat and granted us glory at the same time," Darwish adds. "You are our ministry of propaganda, because the world is interested in you, not in us. I have no illusions on that score."
Does not such a comment - which Godard could after all have omitted from the film - attest to a modicum of awareness regarding Europe's problematic perception of the Middle East conflict, which is tainted by no small amount of self-righteousness, guilt feelings (over the Holocaust, and also over the Continent's colonial past ), and occasionally also dogmatism?
Dr. Ariel Schweitzer is a film historian and critic for the French magazine Cahiers du cinema.
This story is by: Ariel Schweitzer

Holocaust and Genocide News

News for Monday, December 13, 2010

Rwandan Genocide Finds Release In Photos

Ethnic strife can touch off unimaginable horrors. Rwanda is proof of that. A wave of genocidal murder there in 1994 left more than a million dead. Eight hundred thousand people were slaughtered in just 100 days.

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Appeals court reverses itself over Armenian suit

A federal appeals court on Friday reversed itself and now says the heirs of Armenians killed in the Turkish Ottoman Empire can seek payment from companies that sold their relatives life insurance.

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The past is present

A Boston University researcher stumbles upon a remarkable Holocaust artifact - and discovers that one of its creators lives just a few blocks away from him in Brookline.

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An American Scandal

By Meïr Waintrater
December 8, 2010

At this very moment, a university is having to defend itself against a lawsuit. The charge? Declaring that writings denying a genocide are not a basis for students' work. In other words, the university has come up against those who defend the perpetrators of genocide, who want to have their denialist discourse legitimized.

The university is American, headquartered in Minneapolis, the largest city in the State of Minnesota. The genocide in question is the genocide of the Armenians, which was perpetrated by the Ottoman government beginning in 1915. And the complaint was filed by the Turkish Coalition of America, an organization which claims that the genocide did not take place.


The complaint targets the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which is part of the University of Minnesota. This Center has a website for students and researchers which suggests, among other things, recommended readings. It also indicates that other texts on these subjects are "unreliable," beginning with the texts of the Turkish Coalition.
This has angered Turkish lobbyists, who are filing suit against the university, its president, and educator Bruno Chaouat, who directs the Center. They have been defamed, they say, they are being denied the right to speak. They pose as victims because academics have passed scientific judgment on denialist discourse--which is their right, indeed their duty. The university is defending itself, of course, and has every chance of winning this unjust lawsuit. But doubt has been sown in people's minds.
All this may seem far, very far, from us. In reality, we are directly concerned. Not only because the academic in question, Bruno Chaouat, is a French citizen. What happens today in Minneapolis could occur tomorrow in Paris, if we are not careful.
Among us also, the denial of the Armenian Genocide has its advocates. And the deniers of all genocides are alike. Not satisfied with preaching hatred, they want to impose their presence in a discussion where they have no place.
Imagine Pierre Péan giving a course on the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, imagine Faurisson and Garaudy teaching the history of the Shoah. Ridiculous, hateful, intolerable? Yes, but not much more than what some people claim to be dictating to the University of Minnesota. The battle of this university and its teachers for the simple right to tell the truth about genocide is our struggle as well.
© Meïr Waintrater
Posted December 8, 2010, by Menahem Macina at france-israel.org
Original text in French:
http://www.france-israel.org/articles.ahd?idart=1613
See also:
http://www.radiochalomnitsan.com/blog/?p=2203http://www.terredisrael.com/wordpress/?p=28125http://www.armenews.com/article.php3?id_article=65881

"Alternative Narratives or Denial" Reading Discussion Group

Denial of the Holocaust is woven into the very fabric of mass murder. Heinrich Himmler, in his infamous speech to his henchmen at Poznan on October 4, 1943, extolled their extermination of the Jews in these terms: "This is a page of glory in our history never mentioned and never to be mentioned." Secrecy and obfuscation were necessary components of the process, and latter-day denial may be seen as symbolically repeating the crime. The French Historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet has thus aptly called Holocaust deniers the assassins of memory.

In conjunction with our 2011 lecture series "Alternative Narratives or Denial," CHGS is facilitating a reading discussion group focused on seminal works on the topic of Holocaust and genocide denial.


The group will be reading and discussing excerpts from Denying the Holocaust by Deborah Lipstadt (Tuesday, January 11), From Empathy and Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust by Meir Litvak and Esther Webman (Tuesday, February 15) and Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide edited by Richard G. Hovannisian, as well as articles from the Armenian Reporter (Tuesday, March 22).
The first excerpts are Chapters 3, 7 and 10 from Denying the Holocaust and are posted on the CHGS Reading Discussion Group Blog. Entire copies of the book are available at Wilson Library, most metro-area libraries, and bookstores.
The first discussion group will meet on Tuesday, January 11 at 12:00 p.m. in room 710 Social Sciences Building on the University of Minnesota's west bank. Reservations are required and can be made via email at CHGS@umn.edu (please put RDG in the subject line and include your name, phone and email address in the body of the message) or by phone at 612-624-0256.
If are unable to attend in person, you can follow the discussion on the CHGS website or on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Preventing Genocide and Mass Atrocities, Samantha Power

Watch Opening Keynote by Samantha Power at the International Symposium, Preventing Genocide and Mass Atrocities Shoah Memorial, Paris, Nov.15, 2010.

Samantha Power Daily Motion

Samantha Power is Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the United States National Security Council. Before joining the U.S. administration, she was the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She won a Pulitzer Prize for A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Her most recent book is Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. As a journalist, Power reported from Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe for the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, New Republic, Time, The Economist and US News and World Report, among others.

Abba Kovner in letter after Adolf Eichmann trial: A dam has burst of Holocaust survivors' emotions

In the letter, famed Partisan leader explains how the trial suddenly made it possible for survivors to open up about their experiences in the Holocaust.

Haaretz.com
December 2, 2010
By Eli Ashkenazi

A short while after testifying in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Abba Kovner had already realized the enormous impact of the trial and its implications on the way the Holocaust would be remembered in Israel.

In a letter sent to his close friend Yitzhak Avidav, in May 1961, a short while after offering his testimony at the trial, he told Avidav, who at the time was in Poland on a mission for Israel, that "something has happened that is one of the great mysteries of life and of history - which did not happen when the ashes were hot, happened now at a time when the souls are remembered."

The letter was recently given by Kovner's daughter Shlomit for deposit in his file at the Hashomer Hatzayir archive at Yad Ya'ari, in Givat Haviva.
It details how the trial suddenly made it possible for survivors to open up about their experiences in the Holocaust.
"One must see the children, in their last years of school, the young people and the older ones listening to the report of the trial on the radio," the letter continues. "One must see every day the faces of the people filling the court hall, tzabarim [native born], from the Mizrahi communities, ultra-Orthodox and secular, each day different faces from all parts of the nation, coming to sense the enormity of the shock, a sort of spiritual earthquake whose echoes and imprints will remain in the soul of the individual and the nation for days and perhaps even many generations."
In the letter, Kovner, a poet and partisan leader during the Holocaust, describes the enormity of the moment and its impact on survivors, "like a dam that has been burst - thus the sealed hearts of many people among the Holocaust survivors has been opened, and there is no home where someone did not speak out his most hidden memories."
Kovner's 'very sharp senses'
Yonat Rotbein from the Holocaust Studies and Research Center, Moreshet, says that "the words of Kovner describe what many households in Israel experienced at the time, both among Holocaust survivors and among native-born Israelis. People wanted to tell their story and hear."
"The survivors sensed that this was the first opportunity to express themselves. Abba Kovner's letter highlights this [sense] accurately. Perhaps because he had very sharp senses he encapsulated this with greater force," he continues.
The outburst of emotions and the impact of the trial on the individual was an experience that Kovner felt himself, and which he relates in his letter to Avidav, his deputy in Nakam, a group created to avenge the blood of Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
"Take for example my brother. We were in the ghetto together and then in the forest. Except that he came to us to the forest four months later and only now he dared tell me what he experienced those months, and I felt that he felt a need to tell his story."
The conversations between the brothers also revealed the fate of their mother 18 years earlier.
Shlomit, named after her grandmother, says that her father never forgave himself for leaving his mother behind in the ghetto.
At some point Kovner said that his mother came to him as he stood on the barricades of the Vilnius Ghetto, commanding the United Partisan Organization.
"She came and asked me what to do, and I did not think that our position was a place where people would survive. I had no answer. So she went ... and then was caught by the Germans."
His mother was murdered in Ponar, after helping her small granddaughter escape.
Kovner wrote to Avidav that when he took the witness stand, he had "the feeling of Judgment Day."
At the start of the letter, Kovner admits that he had many objections to the trial: He feared the sensationalism of the press, "how and what they will judge?"
"If at the time the Holocaust and the testimonies of survivors which followed did not shock the nation and did not result in soul searching in the Diaspora and it was forgotten and it was also forgotten in Israel," he wrote, "what will this trial contribute?"