HISTORY
Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends
Linda Kinstler
Bloomsbury, $29.99
There has never been a better time to read a book such as this. It doesn’t mention the contemporary phenomenon of truth by assertion. It doesn’t address Putin’s claim that Ukraine was being run by neo-fascists, nor does it get anywhere near Trump’s claim that he was so badly wronged in the last US election that he was free to unleash an unruly mob. It doesn’t need to. The reader will join the dots and soon realise that Linda Kinstler is telling one intricate story with wide ramifications.
The world is vulnerable to DIY historians, those who assemble scattered facts according to a blueprint drawn up in the minds of heaven knows whom. Of course, since the days of Herodotus and Livy, historians have always had an angle, even an axe to grind. But this phenomenon has become so pronounced that a great deal of history, the supposed servant of cultural memory, is currently put to work to ensure we forget certain things just because they happened.
Kinstler’s context is Latvia before, during and after the Second World War. Specifically, she is concerned about a revisionist history that wants to exonerate criminals that took part in the genocide of Jewish people. She writes with a keen awareness that witnesses of the Shoah are getting older and fewer; the passage of years means that their recollections might be questioned because they confuse details.
Read the review by Michael McGirr in The Sydney Morning Herald.