Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your letter and for your comments about
my exchange with Marion. I hope you don't consider it
rude of me to ask for clarification. You write: "I suspect
that I would be in her court if it came to blows."
So much for pacifism. I ask: in her court on which issue,
or on all of them? Surely as an historian you can not subscribe
to Marion's argument that to treat the Holocaust as history
is to remove it from the realm of description, analysis and
adjudication? I thought description and analysis of the
past was what history was all about. And to argue for
judgment in the absence of evidence, i.e. in the absence
of history, is an Alice in Wonderland approach to jurisprudence
which you and I as grateful legatees of the Anglo-American 
tradition of justice should have nothing to do with.

More interesting, and perhaps uniquely objectionable to
you is my comparison of a Harvard teaching hospital with a
Nazi Concentration Camp. I've conceded the umbra of hysteria
attending that definition. And yet I can't deny that the
physical injury inflicted by the Teaching Hospital on the
Chinese Cook was incomparably greater than any physical 
injury inflicted on my father in Buchenwald. And I can't
overlook the justification for the injury inflicted on
the Chinese Cook which was given by Dr. Allen and by Dr. Pollen,
and which was implicitly endorsed by Judge Garrity, that the
injury was justified because it was inflicted in a good cause.
This rationalization is the same as the justification given
by our recent Vice-President, speaking for millions of Americans,
for the torture of prisoners, the same justification incidentally 
given by the Nazis for the killing of gypsies, homosexuals,
Communists, Socialists and Jews. All for a good cause.
It is of course also the justification for all the killing
that is done in war for the sake of freedom and peace.

Even today, I remember the plaintive lamentations of my parents
that were the theme of my childhood: How were the Nazi atrocities
possible? Why did no one object? Why did presumably decent people
cooperate? As a child and as an adolescent I was impressed with
this challenge to an extent that I vowed to myself, never to 
succumb to such complicity. Now, thirty-nine years after I brought
my lawsuit, to prove to myself that I would never have been a
concentration camp guard, I ask myself whether what I did was vain,
perhaps even hypocritical. In any case, it's now too late for me
to undo what I did.  I don't have all the answers. As a matter of
fact, I don't have any of them.

I ask you to pardon me for the intensity of this letter, as for
the almost insane intensity of so much else that I write. Stay
well and give my best to Ned.

Jochen