Death: A Final Solution

As symbolism goes, the death of a 91 year old man accused and found guilty of aiding in genocide-by-excruciating-design as a Nazi-era death camp guard, puts a weary stamp on the world's indifference to the appeal of world Jewry to hunt down and make accountable those who aided and abetted the conspiracy to finally rid the world of Jews.

The Holocaust, that hideously horrendous event of world history quite like none other cannot be reversed through the expedient of insisting on 'justice', bringing ancient decrepit bodies to account for what their robust young bodies and minds were complicit with. Of course the real purpose in the hunting down of those involved, was and remains to ensure that the horrors did not slip into the distant past, beyond memory.

The world has grown weary of the Holocaust, however. The word itself, comparable to none other in its scope and horror, its infinitesimal planning and superb execution, has been appropriated and altered sufficiently to enable it to be bandied about to express condemnation of other, lesser though surely horrible acts of execrable atrocity against human beings.

The perpetrators are feeble and white-haired ghosts of what they were. Of those that are left, few are well known. At a time when action might have been taken and could have been successfully enabled, there were too many other concerns to take the attention of those who could have moved themselves to that purpose, but did not. Accommodations were made, and sometimes criminals in one regard can be useful in another.

John Demjanjuk is dead, of disease and old age, permitted to die in the dignity of being cared for by a state apparatus that took pity on him to release him from incarceration to the comfort of a hospital setting. Those who believe he might be in the agony of death's door, hugely troubled by his past, need not bother themselves by those thoughts of compassion, for he likely felt no personal scruples about any part he may have played in countless deaths.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center will continue pursuing its reason for existence. It is unlikely they will uncover the existence of many other former guards at the Sobibor concentration camp, or elsewhere, for they are long gone. Long gone soon enough will be the memory of those who perished in their helpless millions, victims of a precisely mechanistic state machine that consigned them to death.

Canada's role in bringing justice to the prosecution of those representing fascist Germany's Nazi era of cleansing the world of Jews, has not been a felicitous one. Much was made of establishing a special investigative tribunal, but not much was born of it, though Canada became a haven to quite a number of former death camp guards.

Israel, when it had the opportunity to dispatch Demjanjuk after his 1988 conviction and sentencing there did not, because the Israeli Supreme Court overturned that conviction. There were lingering doubts related to his identity. A testament to the seriousness with which Israeli justice takes its mandate; truth and justice without peer.

A German court had no doubts. But punishment is difficult to mete out to the frail, the sick and the elderly, even if they represent the most vile, despicable and monstrous regime whose pact with death served to distinguish it as one of the world's most disgusting moments with history.