Austria Protects Its Adopted Nazi
IN June 2008, the Sun led with “We find wanted Nazi at Euro 2008” – news that Milivoj Asner was “welcoming his national side Croatia to his adopted Austrian town”.
Now the paper reports that the man who “signed orders for the deportation of Jews, gipsies and Serbs to death camps in the town where he lived in World War Two” is, according to his lawyer, “too ill to face trial”.
A face-to-face interview with the Sun showed that he was lucid and defiant. But justice officials in Austria last night insisted he is unfit to stand trial.
Anorak turns to Primo Levi’s book The Drowned And The Saved and a page in which the writer, a Holocaust survivor, looks at memory:
“Once again it must be observed, mournfully, that the injury cannot be healed: it extends through time, and the Furies, in which existence we are forced to believe, not only wrack the tormentor… but they perpetuate the tormentor’s work by denying space to the tormented.”
If human punishment can make the torturer suffer – then it must be used…
Posted: 1st, May 2009 | In: Reviews Comments (4) | TrackBack | Permalink
