A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (24 page)

Nevertheless, my camp experience has had much to do with my later professional life. Unlike most of my law school classmates,
I was never really interested in the traditional practice of law, that is, in doing what lawyers do in most countries: defending
or prosecuting criminals, representing clients in civil disputes, dealing with domestic relations matters, or otherwise providing
legal advice to individuals and companies. Instead, I was drawn to international law and to international human rights law,
as that branch of international law came to be known, because I believed, somewhat naively at first, that these areas of the
law, if developed and strengthened, could spare future generations the type of terrible human tragedies that Nazi Germany
had visited on the world.

Over time I also gradually concluded that I had an obligation to devote my professional activities to the international protection
of human rights. This sense of obligation had its source in the belief, which grew stronger as the years passed, that those
of us who survived the Holocaust owe it to those who perished in it to try to improve, each in our own way, the lives of others.
To me that meant working for a world in which the rights and dignity of human beings everywhere would be protected. I also
convinced myself that the international law of human rights was a field to which I, as a lawyer and because of my Holocaust
experience, would be able to make a more significant contribution than to any other branch of the law. After all, I knew what
it meant to be a victim of human rights violations.

That my Holocaust experience is never entirely removed from my professional work was brought home to me while dealing with
a complaint submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, on which I began to serve in 1995, by Robert Faurisson, a French
denier of the Holocaust. Having been convicted by French courts for the violation of a French law making Holocaust denial
a criminal offense, Faurisson challenged his conviction and the French law in a complaint filed with the Human Rights Committee.
Given my personal history, I decided to remove myself from hearing the case. I did so with the following declaration: “As
a survivor of the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, whose father, maternal grandparents, and many other
family members were killed in the Nazi Holocaust, I have no choice but to recuse myself from participating in the decision
of this case.”

Before joining the Human Rights Committee, I had served on two major international human rights bodies: the Inter-American
Court of Human Rights and the U.N. Truth Commission for El Salvador. In many ways, they turned out to be my most exciting
and productive human rights activities. The first of these began in 1979 with my election as judge of the newly created Inter-American
Court of Human Rights of the Organization of American States. I remained on the Court, a part-time institution modeled on the
old European Court of Human Rights, for the maximum two six-year terms and served as its president for the usual two-year
period.

During the time I served on the Court, much of Latin America was ruled by military regimes and civilian dictators who were
responsible for massive violations of human rights. While this was not a political climate in which a human rights court could
count on the sympathetic support of many governments in the region, the Court was nevertheless able to lay a relatively solid
foundation for the enforcement in the Western Hemisphere of the rights guaranteed by the American Convention. Our most important
achievement during my time on the Court was the first ever international judgment holding a state — Honduras — liable for
practicing a policy of forced disappearances. The government of Honduras was ordered to pay damages to the families of the
victims and, what is more, fully complied with the judgment.

The Court’s authority had been severely tested, however, in dealing with the Honduran Disappearance Cases. After testifying
against the government, our first witness was murdered on a street of his hometown in Honduras. Another person whom the Court
had decided to call as a witness became the next victim, under similar circumstances, before he ever had a chance to testify.
To our relief, the killings of witnesses stopped as soon as the Court issued an injunction ordering the government of Honduras
to ensure the safety of our witnesses, potential witnesses, and the next of kin of the victims of the disappearances. Our
concern that the killing of witnesses would continue despite the injunction, with the government denying all responsibility,
proved not to be justified.

During my time on the Court, we rendered important decisions relating to freedom of speech, the protection of human rights
during national emergencies, due process of law, and related subjects. All in all, because of my interest in strengthening
the development of international human rights law and institutions, I found my service on the Inter-American Court a dream
come true. It is one thing to theorize about solutions to these problems but quite another to achieve concrete results that
strengthen the protection of human rights.

The role that the Inter-American Court could play at the time was severely limited by the fact that some of the most serious
violators of human rights in the region — among them Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and various Central American countries
— had either not ratified the American Convention or had not accepted the jurisdiction of the Court. These states could consequently
not be brought before the Court. Thus, while we could hear charges against Honduras, which was alleged to have been responsible
for some two hundred forced disappearances, we lacked that power for Argentina which, it was claimed, was responsible for
between fifteen thousand and thirty thousand forced disappearances during its so-called dirty war. The fact that international
human rights courts, international criminal courts, and similar bodies have jurisdiction over only those states that accept
their jurisdiction, means that states that have not done so enjoy the very impunity these tribunals are designed to end. Sad,
but unfortunately true. That is why it is so important, in my opinion, that all states become parties to the Rome Treaty establishing
the International Criminal Court, and why I believe that the United States should ratify it. By not joining, the U.S. government
is sending the wrong message to the international community about its commitment to the international rule of law.

As my service as judge on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights was coming to an end, the secretary-general of the United
Nations appointed me to the three-member United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador. Our charge was to investigate the
massive violations of human rights that had been committed during El Salvador’s twelve-year civil war, which had finally come
to an end a few months earlier. Until then, I had always believed that my Holocaust experience had prepared me to deal with
even the most egregious violations of human rights. In El Salvador, I found this not to be true. To see the skeleton of a
baby still in the womb of a mother killed in the El Mozote massacre, where some five hundred women, children, and old men
had been murdered, was more than I could take without being deeply affected by the utter depravity of those who committed
this and similar crimes.

On entering the corridor of the residence of a group of Jesuit priests in San Salvador, I was shown the portrait of Archbishop
Romero, a bullet hole near his heart. This symbolic reenactment of the archbishop’s murder some years earlier was the work
of the Salvadoran soldiers who, a few minutes later, went on to execute the priests and their housekeeper in the garden of
their residence. The murdered priests’ only “crime,” I learned later, had been their desire to help negotiate a truce between
the military and the guerrillas, something the leadership of the military feared. In El Salvador, we heard again and again
that “orders are orders,” and when we asked some of the military officers and the guerrilla commanders why they had committed
or ordered this or that killing, we were invariably told that it was “
un error,
” a mistake. Never once during our interrogations did I hear expressions of remorse or admissions of guilt; mistakes yes,
guilt no. How to explain that the intentional act of the killing of an innocent human being can be written off as merely a
“mistake”?

El Salvador was a country in which many lived in fear. In this atmosphere, the victims or their next of kin often did not
dare to speak about what had happened to them. People kept their suffering to themselves, hoping for justice but not really
expecting it. For some people, ten years or more had gone by in silence with pent-up anger about the past. Finally someone
— the commission — was listening to them, and the mere fact of telling what had happened was a healing emotional release.
I was surprised to realize that despite their terrible experiences, most of our witnesses were more interested in recounting
their stories than in seeking retribution.

One interview among many others comes to mind in this connection. It involved two women, one Salvadoran and the other either
Swedish or Danish. They had come to the commission together to tell the story of their children. The son of one of the witnesses
and the daughter of the other had met in Europe and had fallen in love. The couple traveled to El Salvador, became involved
in leftist political activities, and were murdered by the military. Their mothers had not met until they decided to testify
before the Truth Commission. They told us that they wanted to honor the memory of their children by telling their story together.

During our work in El Salvador, memories of my own past in another part of the world returned to me over and over again as
we interviewed witnesses, heard their stories, and inspected the killing fields. The suffering that so many people in that
small country had endured during its terrible civil war will remain forever imprinted on my soul. While in El Salvador, I
often wondered whether the fact that I, with my Holocaust background, was investigating these crimes had some symbolic significance.
Was it that these activities and my human rights work generally gave special meaning to my survival or that my survival compelled
me, whether I knew it or not, to pursue these activities?

In the late 1990s, I found myself serving on the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland. The CRT,
as this tribunal came to be known, was set up to search for unclaimed Holocaust-related bank accounts and to help identify
their owners or heirs. As its vice chairman, I had to supervise the CRT’s day-to-day operations and to adjudicate claims submitted
to us. In reading the claimants’ applications and the bank files, my thoughts took me back to the 1930s, when some wealthy
European Jews, vaguely sensing the fate that awaited them with the rise of the Nazis, sought to protect their money in neutral
Switzerland. Many of them did not survive the Holocaust. That benefited the Swiss banks, which used the funds for more than
half a century without ever accounting or expecting to account for their windfall.

Working with a group of commercial arbitrators from Israel, Switzerland, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Belgium,
and a support staff of some twenty young lawyers, our job consisted of trying to determine whether the information provided
us by individual claimants about deceased account holders matched the information found in the files of the Swiss banks. It
was no easy task. Frequently, all we had to work with was the name of the account holder and, at most, a hometown or a profession.
While I tried not to let my anger at the conduct of some banks affect the job I had to do, it was not always easy. For example,
there would be bank files that contained nothing but the name of the account holder, the amount of money remaining in the
account, and a notation that all other information had been discarded. Not only did the banks not pay interest, they frequently
depleted the accounts entirely by deducting bank fees long after they must have known that the depositors had perished in
the Holocaust. There was evidence, moreover, that some banks had told Holocaust survivors seeking information about the bank
accounts of relatives that no such accounts existed in the branch the survivors had identified, when they knew full well that
the accounts existed in other branches.

There was always great joy in our offices in Zurich when we were able to connect the account of a Holocaust victim to an heir,
but there were also moments of sadness when we learned that an heir had died before we had been able to make a finding of
entitlement. Many heirs of account holders were never found. A case I cannot forget concerned an account claimed by a man
and a woman in their seventies, living in different countries, who each contended that they were the sole heir of the account
holder. After reviewing the case file, one of our young lawyers came to see me. He reported that the two claimants appeared
to be siblings and that each believed that the other had perished in the Holocaust. I examined the file and agreed with him.
The entire office was alerted, and there was rejoicing all around: we had not only found the heirs to an account but would
also be able to reunite a brother and sister! Because of the advanced age of the heirs, we decided that the good news should
be conveyed to them very carefully and that the brother should be contacted first. When I saw the face of the young lawyer
shortly after he had made the call, I could guess what had happened: the brother had died three months earlier without ever
learning that his sister was alive.

As chairman of the Committee on Conscience of the Washington-based U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, it was my task to relate
the experience of the Holocaust to contemporary realities by warning against new genocides and crimes against humanity. By
the end of the mid-1990s, our optimistic assumptions that the world had seen the end of these crimes were belied by what was
happening in Rwanda and in the Balkans. Before we had a chance to speak out and get the international community to act, hundreds
of thousands of human beings had died. That was a familiar story to those of us who had survived the Holocaust. Although we
worked very hard to get the international community to take action, that action often came too late, if at all, which only
went to prove that we are still far from the day when “Never again!” really means what it is supposed to mean.