Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust.

• Author: Admirand, Peter
• Position: Book review

Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust

By Corry Guttstadt, translated by Kathleen M. Dell'Orto, Sabine Bartel and Michelle Miles

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 374 pages, $99.00, ISBN 9780521769914.

Before wading in, as an outsider, to the controversial issue of Turkey and the Holocaust, a reminder of what was lost that can never, ever be regained. More important than a people or country's so-called honor or the selfish need to proclaim moral purity or superiority over others, there are the cries of the victims and their loved ones. No earthly justice, no laws, or apologies, or "proof" of innocence or vows of change will alter that. There are some wounds that never fully heal. Numbers--and we are always inundated by numbers when writing of mass atrocities--fail to convey the horror, even as such accounting must occur. Too many tragedies, too many atrocities, fuelled by selected groups of humans and supported or allowed to thrive by the majority continue to wreak havoc. And yet, cries of denial, "not me" or "not us" suck the needed impetus and energy for deep evaluation, moral probing and just action. In the Holocaust, in particular, there are no pure victors, as such, not only because of the accusations against Allied Forces of war crimes as in the Bombing of Dresden, but because wherever there is war and violence, where peace fails, all fail. There were holy and good people amidst the horrors of the Holocaust, thankfully, there have always been such people, but for the victims, there were never enough; there never are enough.

As a Catholic theologian from the United States but living in Europe for over a decade, I know there is no shortage of my own national and religious heritage that can humble my identities: not only from my individual, daily moral failures, but the mixed and checkered histories and roots of the United States, where the legacy of African Slavery and the genocide against Native Americans still need to be addressed, to the past failures of the Catholic Church in its treatment of non-Catholics and in the more recent child sex abuse fiascos. What is called for is not denial, rebuttal, and self-defensiveness, but deep listening to the memory of the victims, to read the bones, if we must, and if there are no bones, to be open and creative to other means of contact. The cries of the victims are there if we seek to hear.

Corry Guttstadt's Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust is a powerful, meticulously researched, and...