National Post (National Edition)
Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz
Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz
One can imagine that the lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, a 27-year-old Romanian Jew who had to stand on a pile of books to see over the lectern and face the Nazi defendants, was nervous on his first day in court. But the man himself, 99-year-old Ben Ferencz, disagrees.
“I wasn’t nervous at all,” he recalls. “I didn’t kill anybody.”
Canadian director Barry Avrich, whose #Metoo doc The Reckoning opened in Toronto last week, has crafted an incredible film about the indelible life and work of Ferencz, mostly by just letting the guy talk. He’s got excellent comic timing: “We travelled third class,” he says of his family’s flight to America in the 1920s. “Because there was no fourth class.”
But his life’s work is no laughing matter. Recalling the time he walked into a newly liberated concentration camp in Germany, Ferencz almost breaks down. You can feel him pushing the visions away before he can continue.
Ferencz was fascinated by criminal law, and disgusted by the crimes of the Third Reich, but on that day in 1945 his opening statement noted: “Vengeance is not our goal.” Indeed, he says today that he would have given the criminals at that trial life sentences rather than the noose. He did not attend the hangings, or the party afterward.
His work in Nuremberg would be enough to cement his place in history, but Ferencz followed up the trial by agreeing to oversee a group seeking reparations for German Jews. He remembers being told by a government official that Germany would pay for the upkeep of Jewish cemeteries — for 20 years. He angrily demanded perpetuity, punctuating his request by producing from his pocket bones he had picked up from the grounds of Auschwitz. He got his request. He subsequently sent the “historic” bones to a Holocaust museum.
Prosecuting Evil also details how Ferencz worked to establish the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which has been operating since 2002. A fascinating sidebar recalls how he wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times in 2000, urging then-president Bill Clinton to become an ICC signatory. He did, though the U.S. government has yet to ratify the document.
Astonishingly, Ferencz’s co-author on the Times piece was Robert Mcnamara, who many have decried as war criminal for his role as the architect of the U.S. war in Vietnam. (He died in 2009.) When Ferencz pointed this out, Mcnamara said that, had an ICC existed during his term as Secretary of Defense, he might never have acted as he did.
Ferencz, who will turn 100 next summer, stands as a remarkable bridge of memory and understanding of the horrors of past wars, and a bulwark against those to come. “War will make mass murderers out of otherwise decent people,” he declares. “I have seen it again and again. And it’s inevitable.” But the force of his argument and the strength of his belief give one real hope that the rule of law may yet supersede that of violence on an international scale. If not, it will not be because Ferencz didn’t do enough. ∏∏∏∏∏
Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz opens Nov. 30 in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.