Never forget or forgive

Thursday is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s also the first day of confirmation hearings for Mike Pompeo, the CIA director tapped by President Trump to become the next Secretary of State. The circles on the calendar overlap — because the Senate has an opportunity and obligation to press Pompeo to do what his predecessors have failed to do, and finally eject a 94-year-old Nazi war criminal now living in Queens from his comfortable American life.

Jakiw Palij served Germany as a death camp guard in occupied Poland in the Second World War. He then lied to come to America, eventually getting U.S. citizenship.

Back in 2003, Justice Department Nazi hunters found him and had a federal judge strip his citizenship; he was ordered deported in 2004.

But Germany won’t take him back, and the U.S. government has never had the gumption to push.

As Neal Sher, the former top U.S. Nazi hunter, says in the adjacent column, that’s indicative of a decades-long failure by the two allies to take such cases seriously.

Indeed, in nine other instances since 2005, proven Nazi war criminals ordered deported from the U.S. by the Department of Justice have died here because Berlin and State both stalled. That enables unforgiveable crimes against humanity to go unpunished.

The question for Pompeo: Will he be different than Secretaries of State Powell, Rice, Clinton, Kerry and Tillerson before him, or will he perpetuate an unacceptable, ineffectual approach?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has taken in a million stateless refugees from the Mideast. One old man should be easy.