COME TO THIS COURT & CRY

A masterful synthesis of family history and Holocaust investigation that blurs lines among perpetrators, justice, and national identity.

Kinstler, the former managing editor of the New Republic, captures a worrisome historical reality in our current moment of creeping authoritarianism. “Survivors have been telling the story of the Holocaust for the better part of a century,” she writes, “and still the judges ask for proof.” Her grim landscape is the “Holocaust by bullets” in the Baltic states following the Soviet Union’s brutal annexation. When the Nazis invaded, local auxiliaries in Latvia, the Arajs Kommando, outdid the Germans in cruelty, murdering Jews without remorse. Aviator Herberts Cukurs, one key member, ducked culpability after the war, but he was assassinated by Mossad in 1965 in Uruguay. (For more on Cukurs, see Stephan Talty’s The Good Assassin.) Kinstler was drawn to the story via a haunting connection: Her long-vanished grandfather, Boris, was also in the Kommando, but he may have been a double agent for the Russians (he “officially” committed suicide following the war). Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to the release of reams of Holocaust documentation, including perpetrator and survivor testimonies, Latvian nationalists and revisionists sought to rehabilitate Cukurs in strange ways, including an operatic stage musical that “sought to absolve both him and his nation from any allegations of complicity.” This also led to renewed investigations into both his murder and his activities inside the Riga ghetto and subsequent massacres of Jews, all of which fueled Kinstler’s determined investigation. “I remained bewildered that, so many decades after the Second World War, questions of complicity, culpability, rehabilitation and restitution were still making their way through the courts,” she writes. The author writes with literary flair and ambition, highlighting the important stories of surviving principals and delving into such relevant topics as jurisprudence, post–Cold War Eastern Europe, and cultural efforts to come to terms with, or rationalize, still-obscured aspects of the Holocaust.

A vital addition to the finite canon of Holocaust studies rooted in personal connection.