I also have the pleasure of serving as cochair of the Museums Committee and my husband and i have had a long and extremely meaningful relationship with the institution and museum which honors the victims of the holocaust and stands as a stark reminder to the importance and lessons of the holocaust and the relevance of those lessons to issues in conflict in todays world. The museum has also found compelling ways to engage many audiences, one that people would never expect, from every background, religious and political persuasion. While the engagement is grounded if holocaust history it serves as a powerful spring board to reflect on contemporary issues, especially genocide. It is a stark reminder that the notion of task is never ending at a time when hatred and systemetism is clear across the world and in the United States we must all stand up. When a time when soshl and rapid changing world magnified that hate the lessons of the holocaust are more challenging then ever and the museums motto what you do matters reflects that idea and asks each of us to be part of the solution and push back and make the world a better place. Tonight our moderator and amazing panel of an Investigative Reporter, a filmmaker and former nazi hunter who explores what it means to receive justice 75 years after the defeat of nazi germany. The panel will tackle questions including is a perpetrator ever to old to prosecute, is it ever too late for accountability . The conversation tonight will last 15 minutes and then well turn to the audience for questions for 15 or 20 minutes. You should have all received an index card and to the extent you have a question please write it on the card and submit your card for the panel. Following the program debbie will sign copies of her recent book citizen 865, the hunt for hitlers hidden soldiers in america she will do so outside the theater. I read debbies book it is really wonderful and i really commend it to you. Finally, it is my honor to introduce todays opening speaker, irene rice. 75 years ago atrocities People Struggle to believe but as visual evidence became available and survivors gave testimony the world recognized the magnitude and horror of the holocaust. Our guest speaker, one of the few remaining auschwitz survivors have promoted her life to this mission by telling her story to as many people as possible she hoped to recognize and resist the force of hatred and prejudice and division that exist in our time. Without further adieu its my great pleasure and honor to introduce irene rice. [ applause ] thank you, very much. For inviting me here tonight. In 2015 and 2016 i was asked to testify in the trial of ss sergeant oscar gruny and ryan hold honing. My family and i were part of the hungarian transports to auschwitz that arrived during the time they worked there. In addition to be a coplaintiff i needed to have had close family members who were murdered there. As a coplaintiff i was not required to recognize gruny and honing who served as guards while i was a prisoner in auschwitz. I along with other coplaintiffs were called to testify about what we saw and experienced in auschwitz and about the role grun and honing played as guards in facilitating the efficient process of genocide. In the spring of 1944 my family was deported to auschwitz from hungary. I was 13 years old. Upon arrival at the camp my mother and four siblings were taken to the gas chamber along with hundreds of others from that transport. My father was forced to work as a commando removing corpses from the gas chamber. I learned later that he was shot and killed. My 17yearold sister serena and i were selected for slave labor. We worked in the storage warehouse located near crematorium four and five. Our job was to sort mountains of those brought to us preparing belongings to be shipped back to germany. We worked there for eight months. Day and night. Columns of Young Mothers with children and elderly men and women took their last steps as they passed by our barrack through the gate that led to the gas chamber. My brain could not absorb what i was seeing. I thought this place was not on this earth. In january, 1945, as the russian army approached, auschwitz was evacuated and we were forced thousands of others on a death march deeper into germany. Eventually ending up in a sub camp of robins brook. Evidence of the trial established that from 1941 to 1944 gruny worked as a socalled bookkeeper of auschwitz. He was collecting the money and valuables taken from arriving prisoners. He also worked on the selection ramp. Honing was an ss guard at auschwitz from early 1942 until 1944. Monitoring arriving prisoners as they were selected for work or sent to the gas chambers. He also helped direct and control people during the separation of families. It was on record that gruning denied any personal responsibility for the mass murder at auschwitz. He said he was morally guilty but not legally. He said he acted out of a sense of duty and was just following order orders. He believed the jews were enemies of the germany people. He simply did his part so that the camp functioned efficiently. He referred to the killing as the hungarian action. Or tending to the arriving jews. Reverting to nazi jargon from when he worked at auschwitz. Never saying gassing or murder. He described witnessing an ss guard bashing a babys head against the side of a truck, an action he described as inappropriate. After all, he explained, the baby could just have well been killed in another less messy way. For instance by shooting. This was his way of showing that he had empathy. It showed that the mass killing of thousands of babies and others was not a cause for any reflection or regret on his part. Unlike gruning who gazed around the courtroom at the coplaintiffs, honing never looked up at all. He kept his head down and his chin pressed against his chest. Some interpreted this as contempt, others thought that he felt overwhelmed. None of us knew what to think. His job had been to guard the camp. Experts testified his srk s group was on duty when the deportation train as lived. Without the guards the mass murder could not have been possible. He had a leadership role and performed his work so well that he was promoted twice during his time there. My memory of the guards as a 13yearold was terrifying. With their tall, shiny boots and elegant uniforms. They had contempt for us. They had complete power over our life and deaths. They looked at us with contempt. You did not look them in the eye. At the trials, i instead encounter a couple of frail old men in wheelchairs accompanied by a nurse. If they were in uniform i would have trembled and all of the horror i experienced in auschwitz would have returned. Any person who wore that uniform in that place represented terror and the depths to which humanity can sink regardless of function they perform. So why had i agreed to testify . I was hoping to hear some regrets that they participated in a monumental tragedy. I was hoping to hear they also were suffering from their memories of that time. I wanted to hear from them and the others who testified about what the consequences were of what they did. Looking back, did they feel misled . By the evil laws and ideology of the time. Did they regret the part they played in that evil . Did they have some lessons to impart to the world today about resisting the effects of mass indoctrination and dehumanization. I was looking to confront and face, face to face with a person who participated in the destruction of my family. During both trials photographs of my mother and siblings taken by nazi guards on the day of our arrival were displayed on overhead screens becoming part of the Permanent Court record and clearly visible to the defe defendants. We never received any answers to the questions. Gruning and honing did not seem to grasp the perspective of a lifetime, the full moral implication of what they had done as young men. This recurring human failure to take responsibility for evil acts or even to properly distinguish between good and evil when under the influence of nationalism and propaganda makes it the more important that we remain on the alert against these forces. A whole generation of germans, the children and grandchildren of perpetrators of the nazi genocide heard very little from their parents and grandparents about what they had done in auschwitz and other factories of death. It is time, at long last, to stop suppressing this history. One positive aspect of testifying in these trials was the close relationship my family and i developed with the german prosecuting attorneys. Their compassion and sense of mission helped to see me through the ordeal of the trials. The outpouring of support from the german public was also gratifying. When the survivors arrived each day to the court the local citizens were lined up around the block waiting to get in. The trials were widely covered by the german media and i can only hope that they contributed to the education of the german public about this dark period in history. To that end, i joined other survivors, government officials in poland last week for the 75th commemoration of the liberation of auschwitz. Our presence in that place, the symbol of ultimate evil further added to the worlds understanding of what happened there. One observation, the german courts were careful to ensure that these two old men received due process and were given every consideration related to their health and age. The tragic irony, of course, is that my family and millions of other jewish simpcivilians were enslaved and killed without any due process at all. Thank you so much for listening. [ applause ] good evening. Am i on . Can you hear me in the back . All right. Good evening. Id like to begin first by thanking mrs. Irene weise for your moving and couragious and inspirational words. Thank you. Irene, you and the other survivors remind us that justice is much more than an abstract concept and we cant lose sight of the human toll these crimes represent and that the pain and loss of survivors and families knows no statute of limitations and also crimes are not statute of limitations. Thank you for that framing. Tonight we have an outstanding panel beginning to my left, debbie who is a pull Pulitzer Prize winning Investigative Reporter for wash post and author of a new book i can tell you i took it with me on a work trip. I needed to prep for this panel. I read it all in one flight. Its really that good. Debbie is the newly named director of investigative reporting at northwestern university. Welcome, debbie. Were also delighted to be joined by ricky gerwits an experienced Television Producer and congratulations on the accountant of auschwitz. Were pleased to recognize rickys coproducer in the audience, currently ricky is producer at the monks debate Worlds Largest public debate forum. Last but certainly not least my colleague dr. Bari white senior histori historian here and chief historian at u. S. Department of justice and Justice Department human rights and special prosecution session so we have a lot to learn tonight. Before i turn to the panel i want to note in a tremendous stroke of serendipity we couldnt have timed this panel much better. Some may have seen in the wash post last week a great story by about a truly unique and Ground Breaking collection of perpetrator materials, over 600 photographs and dozens of documents collected by the killing center. We here at the Holocaust Museum are pleased to be the current repository of this collection and what you are seeing on the screen is from just this morning. We just flew over the materials from berlin and this morning had them delivered to our collections facility and youre seeing pictures of the gloved hands of our preserve ators as we begin to preserve and stabilize and further example the kind of material that would have proved evidence in the types of trials and prosecutions were describing today. So truly a momentous day for the museum and for this field. Debbie, lets begin with you, if we could. To write your book, citizen 865 how did you first get interested in this topic . What brought to you to the story. First of all, thank you for having me. So i was at a Cocktail Party in maryland in the last few moments of 2016 i fell into a conversation with a Justice Department lawyer who over the course of about two hours started telling me about this unit inside the Justice Department that had spent 30 or so years hunting for nazi war criminals living on u. S. Soil and i remember thinking that night, two things, one was how is it possible that 70 plus years after the end of the war we were still finding nazi war criminals and collaborators here in the United States. And two, for me, as a journalist i was intrigued by the iddea of the people doing the works, particularly historians. I relate a lot to people who dig through documents for a living. I really wanted to know the people who spent the bulk of their professional careers searching for these people. How was it possible that they had spent day after day and year after year digging inside, living inside some of the darkest moments in history and then going home at night to their families and husbands and wives and children, how is it possible for them to balance those things and i was fascinated bit back stories of the people doing the work. And indeed, in your book you really follow those sort of two threads, one, about the cases themselves. The investigative process, and the other about the people, like be barry and your colleagues who came up with Creative Strategies to pursue cases we might not have had jurisdictions. Id like to ask how did the film accountant of auschwitz how did that come about, was it the story you set out from the outset. As you mentioned, i was working as Television News producer in canada and in april 2015, you know, we get tickers every day that tell us what the main, the headlines are, and it said auschwitz guard goes on trial in germany, 94, and i thought, oh, well, hes guilty. Whats the point of a trial. You know. And the more i read about his case but also his story and the legal precedent that allowed him to be prosecuted i thought wow theres a lot more here than just a closed, closed case, like, this is theres a lot to unpack here and theres a lot of both moral and legal ambiguity and i think a documentary might we a great place to explore that gray area. For those who havent seen the film. Its it uses this trial to get at kind of the failure of the german prosecutors after the war and going after the perpetrators and how this new generation has tried to rectify that by by interpreting the law in a different way but also the people who are there for being prosecuted are kind of the lower level guards, the people who were not necessarily pouring into the gas chamber but people like oscar growning or ryan hold tan a who made sure the camp was running efficiently. Which are who are also complicit. So thats kind of how i came to that, the story. And sorry what was the second question. Whether it was the story you thought you would tell, how it unfolded . Yes, there were many moments as any documentary filmmaker will tell you where you feel this is not going the way i had planned and i do feel quite fortunate in saying that the story we told is kind of what we wanted to from the beginning. So i am quite pleased in that regard. Well, instead of just talking about the film. Lets have a look at a clip that gets to the existent marshall questions about is it ever too late to pursue justice. How low is someone in the hierarchy and what is that guilt. So lets have a look. How ridiculous theyre doing this now when these people are all in their 90s. So how did we get to the point that there is such a trial as the oscar growning case. So what brought you to this work and since osi, office of special investigations, as is the former name of this doj office, it was only established if 1979, how did you and your colleagues grapple with some of these questions about is it too late, how old is someone, what is right . Well, yes, i did not set out thinking i was going to investigate nazi crimes. In college i studied european history and languages. And one of the things that really got me to focus more on german history was actually the experience of growing up in the segregated south. My parents worked for desegregation and civil rights so from an early age i recognized the cruelty and evil of racism and i wrestled with the question of why so many people i knew who were themselves kind and considered themselves good christians and patriotic americans would go along and even support a system that seemed obviously contrary to their values. And german history in early 20th century provides the ultimate example of people supposedly civilized, educated people, descending from prejudice, persecution and ultimately genocide, which we would like to think is the most uncivilized of behaviors. So i specialized in german history, wrote on a military topic, not great choices in terms of finding a lucrative career but as it turned out osi considered my knowledge of german army and ability to read old german handwriting to be assets and of course when i was given the opportunity to help achieve some measure of justice for the victims of racism i felt so lucky and honored to have work to do that i was fully committed to. And how long did you end up doing this unexpected, unplanned thing . Yeah when i was hired we were told the office would last three to five years at most. I worked there 29 years. But the question about the age of perpetrators, yes, we got that a lot. A lot of people challenged us, debbie writes about a lot of the push back we got, people would say, why are you going after these poor, old men for something they did decades ago. And i would generally respond, yeah, i agree with you, it would have been much better if they had been brought to account back in the day and if they hadnt been able to lie about their activities and get visas it might have gone to actual refugees and victims but when do you suggest we set the time limit after which you say to a perpetrator oh, congratulations youve avoided justice long enough now, you can just live your life in peace amongst us. You know. This is a question that doesnt come up around other kinds of perpetrators. So debbie writes in her book about my colleague Mike Bernsteen who was murdered in pan flight 133, that was 20 years ago. 20 years from now we find someone with some role in the plot nobodys going to say oh, poor thing, we shouldnt prosecute that person, that that persons advanced age somehow outw