“What would you grab, if you had to pack up your life in only minutes?”

Let me precede this entry with saying that during these past months where we have been in quarantine due to the growing cases of covid-afflicted patients, I have done nothing but watch all the shows that I've always wanted to but couldn't because life has always gotten in the way. And then the nationwide quarantine came. I now have all the time in the world to just laze in front of the TV and absorb as much random information as I can from the shows that have fascinated me for years now. I'd like to believe that I'm a mentally stable person who just happens to be overly fascinated with crime scene investigations. I've been teased so many times by my brothers and a few close friends because sometimes, I can't stop my verbal vomit of how forensic science has conclusively solved a murder investigation. And it's true, my Netflix account is used primarily to watch the 20-minute episodes of Forensic Files. It makes me feel safe knowing that the technology of today is no longer as unreliable as it used to be. I'm relieved to know that a criminal, no matter how organized and attentive to detail he is, can no longer commit the so-called perfect crime. It is while watching this show that I encountered the story of an archbishop who turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer in his past. 

“Good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it.”

Last Feb 2019, one of my closest friends and I embarked on a 3wk Eurotrip. Despite consistently having a European country in my bucketlist of countries to visit before I turn so and so, it's only been last year that I finally had the chance to go. Since most of the intellectual figures whom I heavily obsessed on at one point in my life came from Europe, I've always thought that there's something in the European waters that have either produced or inspired brilliance to spring forth. Not to mention that Europe as a whole seems to have an abundance of natural beauty. 

Dress: Calvin Klein | Boots: from a department store in US | Bag: Prada | Sunglasses: Ray-Ban | Heattech used as Inner top: Uniqlo | Earrings: borrowed from my friend Tatiana

In the first paragraph, I was referring to Valerian Trifa, who served as Archbishop of Detroit. He entered USA under the false pretenses that he was a Romanian victim of the Holocaust. He was granted the US citizenship and worked his way up the ranks in the Church. Other Romanian refugees who sought asylum in the US identified him as a member of the Iron Guard and was responsible for the death of hundreds of Jews in Romania, all in the service of the Fuhrer. Despite his initial denial of his past, he was eventually stripped off of his US citizenship and he was asked to leave the US after living there for more than 40yrs. Forensic scientists proved that the Archbishop's penmanship matched positively to the penmanship of the person whom he was accused of being. His official church documents were compared to the penmanship found on a postcard which was signed by a vacationing Iron Guard member in Germany, that was dated in the 1940s. Moreover, the same postcard bore his thumbprint (which was only identified in the 1980s because that's when technology finally caught up). He died at the age of 72yrs old, in a city in Portugal, the only country that accepted him after learning of his past. 

“It’s a little convenient, isn’t it, to say that the reason you did something horrible was because someone else told you to. That doesn’t make it any less wrong. No matter how many people are telling you to jump off a bridge, you always have the option to turn around and walk away.”

Perhaps the first time that I ever became aware of the existence of the US' Office of Special Investigations was when I read Jodi Picoult's The Storyteller in 2013 (all the quotes in this post, including the title that I've used are lifted from this but I will write my thoughts on the book extensively in a separate post). Imagine my interest in learning that so many of the SS officers fled to the US under false pretenses to escape the consequences of the horrible crime that they've committed during WWII. A lot of them have successfully escaped for various reasons but perhaps among the biggest was, their conviction heavily relied on the accounts of the survivors. I won't pretend that I know about physiological changes so I'm assuming that it would be difficult to assume how one person would look like when you add 30 - 40 yrs to his age. How difficult it must be to identify a 70yr old everyday guy to be the same person who tortured you decades ago. 

“Power isn't about doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, Reiner. It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.”

I think that people like Trifa, or John Demjanjuk (the SS guard who also made a life in the US after his stint in the concentration camps but was later on tried in Israel for his war crimes), thought that they deserve a second chance. Maybe they thought that they were just pawns in the chess game. In the case of Trifa particularly, perhaps he thought that he can atone for his participation in the murder of hundreds of Jews by serving the Church in the latter part of his life. He was a Nazi sympathizer in his youth only to become a man of the Church in his adulthood. But the question is, are their crimes pardonable to begin with? What about the lives of the millions of those who suffered just because they happened to believe in a different Being?  Who can judge if the repentance of people like Trifa is enough to compensate for the millions of lives that they've disregarded? Can their form of repentance ever be enough?

“It's easy to say you will do what's right and shun what's wrong, but when you get close enough to any given situation, you realize that there is no black or white. There are gradations of gray.”

In light with everything that's happening worldwide, I just wish that humankind would learn from the past. Discrimination is rampant; it always has been. We've known that it's what caused the greatest atrocities committed against humanity yet we cannot fully reject it. How come people only know better after committing the crime? As an answer to whether the crimes committed during the Holocaust is pardonable or not, I personally agree that regardless of the age, those who have participated must not have the right to enjoy the remaining years of their life in freedom. There are some sins that cannot be forgiven. They might be 'mere pawns' as they have limited their role to be, but it was a role nonetheless. If there won't be any roles, then there wouldn't have been murders. It's a system that requires the thinkers or the heads and the hands or the pawns who would act on what the former has decided on. I think that punishing them is not a retribution because after all, the dead will not return to life, but rather, it's a message to all those who would dare commit such a crime again. It's a message that says, we will all be accountable for our own actions, no matter how big or how small we think them to be. At the end of the day, we get to choose the person who we are going to be. 

“There was no black or white. Someone who had been good her entire life could, in fact, do something evil. People were just as capable of committing murder, under the right circumstances, as any monster.”

These photos were taken in Ljubljana, Slovenia last 15 Feb 2019. (I couldn't imagine going on this trip with anyone else but you, Tats! Thank you for joining me despite the less than 2wks notice)