Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends With Linda Kinstler and Andrew Gross

A few years ago Linda Kinstler discovered that a man fifty years dead – a former Nazi who belonged to the same killing unit as her grandfather – was the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation in Latvia. The proceedings threatened to pardon his crimes. They put on the line hard-won facts about the Holocaust at the precise moment that the last living survivors – the last legal witnesses – were dying.

Across the world, Second World War-era cases are winding their way through the courts. Survivors have been telling their stories for the better part of a century, and still judges ask for proof. Where do these stories end? What responsibilities attend their transmission, so many generations on? How many ghosts need to be put on trial for us to consider the crime scene of history closed?

About our guests

Linda Kinstler is the executive editor of The Dial magazine, and a contributing writer for The Economist’s 1843 Magazine and for Jewish Currents. Come to this Court and Cry won the 2023 Whiting Award in Nonfiction and was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize for Jewish literature. She was also a 2023 finalist for the Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing, and her reporting for Jewish Currents has been honored by the American Jewish Press Association’s Rockower Awards. 

Andrew S. Gross is Professor of North American Studies at the University of Göttingen since 2015. Previously Andrew Gross held positions at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (2012-2015), at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Free University of Berlin (2004-2012), and at the University of California, Davis (1993-2004).