Come to This Court and Cry

How the Holocaust Ends

By: Linda Kinstler

Narrated by: Laurence Bouvard

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?

In this major non-fiction debut, Linda Kinstler investigates both her family story and the archives of ten nations to examine what it takes to prove history in our uncertain century. Probing and profound, Come to this Court and Cry is about the nature of memory and justice when revisionism, ultra-nationalism and denialism make it feel like history is slipping out from under our feet. It asks how the stories we tell about ourselves, our families and our nations are passed down, how we alter them, and what they demand of us.

©2022 Linda Kinstler (P)2022 PublicAffairs

Critic reviews

“Obviously a masterpiece. A book that makes the Holocaust fresh, slipping seamlessly between story, thinking, politics, poetry, and the personal.”—Peter Pomerantsev

“Linda Kinstler has achieved something truly unusual: A book that captures the paradoxes and nuances of memory politics in contemporary Eastern Europe, while at the same time invoking the trauma that past tragedies leave on individuals and families. Using rigorous, evocative prose, she reminds us of the dangerous instability of truth and testimony, and the urgent need, in the twenty-first century, to keep telling the history of the twentieth.”—Anne Applebaum

“First, I was moved, then I was gripped, and now I am haunted by Kinstler’s astonishing new book. Its story is a universal one and its contribution to Jewish thinking about the Holocaust is considerable.”—Ben Judah

Incredible Book

This is a phenomenal book. It will pull you in and not let go. That grip is the result of both compelling subject matter and masterful writing. I fully recommend this to all.

Meticulous narrative of a story that had to be told

Wonderful book that addressed morality, geopolitics, history, family dynamics and more in a compelling and elegant manner. The true history of the Holocaust era Latvian Jews, the monsters who slaughtered them, the sinister revisionist rehabilitation attempts and the tribunals that followed had to be documented now.

A Story Needed to be Told

How are Nazi crimes presented in our modern age? How do we understand the crimes of the past? This book compiles a wealth of knowledge on these questions and makes us think about how the future will represent the past. One is made to think about how Nazi crimes are presented in our modern day. For myself, it is a question of how I will present the Holocaust to my students. How I will present genocide in a classroom.

How stories are still being told.