Justice Not Vengeance: A Key Question for the 21st Century By Richard Odier, President of the Simon Wiesenthal Center – France November 2007 Richard Odier comes from a background in finance and business management. He is actively involved in the world of NGOs and the pursuit of "Justice." He serves as the President of Centre Simon Wiesenthal in France and is the Secretary General of the European Network Against Racism-France, among other activities. He resides in Paris with his wife and two children. This article relates to his activities as President of the French Wiesenthal Center.

In a book written 30 years ago, Simon Wiesenthal tackles the question of justice and forgiveness. The Sunflower tells the story of a Nazi concentration camp guard, who on his deathbed, asks Wiesenthal for forgiveness.

Wiesenthal couldn’t do it. And sso until his death in 2005 he kept asking himself these questions: “Should have I given my forgiveness? Who am I to refuse to give this young Nazi a final blessing or a sense of forgiveness? Yet did my six million brothers and sisters give me a mandate to answer?”


What is Justice?

The Rabbis teach that gentiles are bound by Noah’s Covenant, seven common laws which need to be respected by any human being. Among these is a law called Dinim: the requirement to set up righteous and honest courts and apply fair justice in judging offenders. The Rabbis state that Dinim is required to create balance in society, so that it doesn’t deteriorate into endless cycles of vengeance. During my philosophy studies I learnt a more secular definition of Justice : “ to be able to repair the fault, then to compensate the damage and also make amends for the harm that has been done.”

Immediately after the Shoah, the question of Justice became a central issue for the Jewish people, as illustrated by Wiesenthal’s story. How can we find a balance in the world, if this Dinim law wasn’t applied to us? And given events around the world subsequent to World War II, one might also ask what do these concepts mean for any person at the beginning of the 21st century?

As President of the Simon Wiesenthal Center – France, I have spent days and nights trying to find an answer, trying to find a definition of Justice that applies to the world we live in. I read hundreds of books, study Jewish texts and attend conferences on the topic. I have talked with Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal, the Krasfeld, Poliakov, Simone Veil. I have talked with former deportees, to my own family. I went to Rwanda. I now work with the French committee Save Darfur. And yet. I don’t have answers. How can we find fair justice after Birkenau, Maidanek or Sobibor?

During the 20^th Century the world faced several acts of genocide. If we take the genocide of the Jews and the Tutsis as “generic” cases, we can find two different legal responses: the Nuremberg trials after World War II and the Gacaca in Rwanda.


The Nuremberg Trials:

The Nuremberg trials were a series of trials for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military and economic leadership of Nazi Germany. The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Germany from 1945 to 1949. The mass killing of the Jews was not the main subject. The main issues were war damages, war crimes, mass killings and theft. Most defendants claimed that they never acted voluntarily. They perpetrated the crimes of the Genocide only because they were forced to. They were threatened into shooting, gassing, stabbing. Despite their defence, most accused were found guilty. Some were hanged, some were sentenced for life and some others spent years in prison.

During this trial, no one talked of Anne Frank, of the 90 relatives of Simon Wiesenthal who died in the camps, of Elie Wiesel’s father, of my own great-grand father who went from beautiful Paris to Sobibor in a week, and was gassed immediately after getting off the train. Were these trial an attempt to repair the fault, as the definition of Justice demands ? Did anyone amend for their crimes?


The Gacaca

In Rwanda, almost a million Tustis and moderate Hutus were killed from April to July 1994. Jean Hatzfeld, a French journalist, called this period “the machete seasons.” The perpetrators of this genocide killed their own neighbours daily. They shared the same faith, the same land, the same language yet it was not enough to prevent hate.

When the killing stopped, victims and torturers had to live again together in the same villages. Though the FPR (Tutsi) army came to power in 1994, Tutsi were still a minority. Hutu and Tutsi had to go back to living their lives. So how could they find a fair justice?

A few years after the Genocide, the UN set up the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (currently based in Arusha, Tanzania). The Tribunal has jurisdiction over high level members of the government and armed forces. But this Court was not enough. What about the masses - the lower level leaders and local people involved in the killings? How can you bring to justice tens of thousands of killers, in a country which suffers a lack of so many things? Inspired by tradition, the Rwandese government had the idea of using community, participatory justice. In 2001. they set up the Gacaca. During the Gacaca, the perpetrators confess their crimes and ask for mercy and forgiveness.

I went to those courts to try and understand what was going on there: victims facing their murderers. It seemed that the system was in accordance with the Dinim. It seemed to be a “righteous and honest trial.” But was it fair justice? I don’t know.

During my stay in Rwanda, I listened to many victims. They were complaining that “all was not said during the court”. “The executer mentioned ten crimes, but didn’t say that he also killed two cows, he didn’t say that he raped the little sister, he didn’t admit the burning of the house.” In an other Gacaca, I heard the victims say:”he is still looking at me with hatred, he scares me, he has no remorse.” There again, was this really an attempt to repair the fault? Did anyone amend for all their crimes?


Justice not Vengeance

So the question remains: is ther no way to find a fair justice when faced with Genocide?
I don’t know. I have only questions.

Let’s go back to the Jewish Texts. In the Sidrah (weekly Torah portion) called Shoftim, there is the command: Tseddek, Tseddek Tirdof (Justice, justice shall you pursue. (Deut. 16:20) . Why is justice mentioned twice? According to the Rabbis, the first occurrence means justice established by the courts and the second one refers to justice we personally pursue in our lives. Justice is not only a legal issue, it is also something we must personally seek out.

From the Nuremberg and Gacaca examples, it is obvious that legal justice doesn’t fulfil all of people’s expectations. In Nuremberg, the victims were not mentioned but the murderers were judged and received a punishment. In the Gacaca, the living victims are heard but the murderers don’t confess all the details and some crimes are forgotten. Time is running out: all the criminals won’t be judged. The Rwanda government has other priorities in trying to rebuild a country.

Nevertheless, Justice is not vengeance, which means we need to find a balance. Père Dubois, a French priest, has worked for years in Ukraine to study what it is called “the Shoah by bullets.” Between 1941 and 1944, almost one and a half million Ukrainian Jews were assassinated when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In his study he reveals that most of the killers were “ordinary” people: father, musicians, poets, singers and at the same time brutal murderers. Almost none of them faced a criminal Court after the war. They went back to their families and their lives. Did we fail our mission to “pursue Justice”?

I don’t think so. In terms of legal justice, many Nazis were brought to trial for their crimes. The State of Israel tried Adolf Eichmann, and there he had to face survivors and had to listen to the victims. Organisations such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center are still trying to bring the last living criminals to trial. Ephraim Zuroff, in charge of our Israeli office, is still travelling the world in search of Nazi criminals (see www.operationlastchance.org). But we have also pursued Justice through historical memory and education. The Jewish people have been able to find some harmony, because we are able to gather three sides of remembrance:

The Klarsfed’s Way: Memory of the Victims
First, we have tried to find the names of the victims. In France for example, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, have been able to collect almost all the names of the Jewish children who were deported from France. We have established tombstones and memorials. Films such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah are now part of our Jewish life.

The Yad Vashem Way: Memory of the Righteous
In 1963, the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem, embarked upon a worldwide project to grant the title of Righteous Among the Nations to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. It was a basic necessity to understand that we the victims were not alone. Some saved humanity by saving Jews. Though most of the world was silent, some stood up and risked their lives. They came from all religions, countries and social backgrounds.

Simon Wiesenthal: Memory of the Murderers
It was not enough to remember the victims and the righteous. Some men and women took part in this slaughter. They were also part of this tragedy. There is no way we can find Justice if the perpetrators are not found and identified.


Justice in the 21st Century

It is now November 2007, almost 70 years after the beginning of World War II. To work on this notion of fair justice still remains one of the central issues for the Jewish People. We still must disseminate the lessons of the Shoah and fight contemporary anti-Semitism. But this is not only or specifically a Jewish issue. The world is still full of wars, criminals, battles and dangers. Many Jewish philosophers, scholars and rabbis have developed a new way of thinking about Justice. It comes out of the Jewish tradition and it is called Tikun Olam, a Hebrew expression that means “repairing the world” or “perfecting the world”. Fair justice means not only bringing people to trial, not only trying to heal old wounds, but working to prevent new injustices.

As Elie Wiesel has said “the mission of the Jewish People is not to Judaize the world but to humanize the world”. By understanding the real meaning of Justice, we will fight against racism and xenophobia, fight against new acts of Genocide (such as now going on in Darfur), fight for civil and human rights and fight for peace, not only in the Jewish world, but the world over.