"Guilty, but Not Guilty"

At first, I was annoyed.

In a book called "The Sonderberg Case," is it right not to get to the case, even almost in passing until almost halfway through the book?

But I kept reading.

The case finally begins.

Then other weird things happen.

An unreliable narrator?

No, not really -- a narrator with an unreliable life.

And the plea: Guilty, but not guilty.

Then this:

"Will you ever come to understand what you did to me and to my generation? Hitler and you, you kept proclaiming it was for the future of Germany's children that you were at war with the rest of the world; for us that you were destroying entire cities; for us that you erased our right to pride, honor, and hope for centuries to come. Before his suicide, Hitler, in his will, expressed his wish to punish the German people by turning Germany into a mountain of rubble. But what you did was worse; you took revenge on us, your descendants. Because of you, all of you, though we were born long after your atrocities, we feel guilty. . . According to a Jewish saying, life is a wheel that never stops turning. Look at your life: what you did to the Jews is what you are living through now. You wanted to isolate them, you're isolated; you wanted to hunt them down, you're hunted; you made it impossible for them to live without anxiety, now you'll never live without anxiety. And you'll share the fate of your master."

I'm reminded of a story from the Book of Mormon, where a people called the Anti-Nephi-Lehies decided thwy would rather bury their weapons of war and be killed by their enemies, rather than defend themselves, as payment for the murders committed by their ancestors.

Their leader says this:

"Oh, how merciful is our God! And now behold, since it has been as much as we could do to get our stains taken away from us, and our swords are made bright, let us hide them away that they may be kept bright, as a testimony to our God at the last day, or at the day that we shall be brought to stand before him to be judged, that we have not stained our swords in the blood of our bretheren sinc he imparted his word unto us and has made us clean thereby.

"And now, my bretheren, if our brethren seek to destroy us, behold, we will hide away our swords, year, even we will bury them deep in the earth, that they may be kept bright, as a testimony that we have never used them, at the last day; and if our brethren destroy us, behold, we shall go to our God and shall be saved."

There are a lot of people out there who say they do what they do "for the children." Elie Wiesel is cautioning us to look at their methods before we consider whether what they do for the children is actually helpful.

And there are some of you reading this who'll be quick to point out the sins of the other. Well, I'm not going to. Let he who is without sin first cast a stone, because there are a lof of people with a lot of different politics out there doing things "for the children" using methods and reasons and talking points that are anything but child-friendly.

This is a powerful book, folks. Read it. Preferably in front of a mirror.