It's almost 64 years since the end of the war, the Wiesenthal Center's work seems to have become almost limited to compilation of a historical chronicle rather than an actual pursuit of living fugitives. A war criminal who was 18 on VE Day would be coming up on his 82d birthday now, i.e. the odds are he would have died ten years ago.
You know, this reminds me of something I told the neighbor the other day, about reconstruction of the Church of Our Savior inside the walls of the Kremlin, during the mid-1990s, when I was wandering around the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants.
This is long, but trust me, I'll get to the point at the end.
The Church of Our Savior had been universally regarded as the "most beautiful" church in all of Russia--there were other churches more important or more historical, but this was considered the most aesthetic.
Joseph Stalin during the late 1920s had the magnificent edifice torn down, the idea being to put up a statue of Vladimir Lenin, that was to be three times the height of the Statue of Liberty in New York City.
However, immediately developed a problem. The ground, which hitherto had been solid as a rock, began sinking, and filling with water. For almost thirty years, much money and slave labor was expended upon draining out the water, but the more that was drained, the more water filled in.
After the death of Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev decided, well, we can't do anything about this, but since it's water, we might as well build the world's largest indoor swimming pool on the site.
Which was done, but had to be done repeatedly, as the world's largest indoor swimming pool kept sinking into the ground, into the water.
After twenty years of this, under Leonid Brezhnev, the socialists finally gave up, and let everything sink, the site becoming a bog, a swamp, in the middle of the Kremlin.
Under Yuri Andropov during the early 1980s, because the Soviet socialists were collapsing into decreptitude and bankruptcy, the ground was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church, so as to lessen the burden on the state.
I'm not going to go there, especially with so many Protestants on this board, but it was scientifically and geologically noted that once the land was returned to its original owners, the ground stopped sinking, and the water went away. Maybe all the scientists and geologists figured out why, or maybe it was a miracle. I have no idea.
Anyway, to get to my point.
In the mid-1990s, it was decided to recreate the Church of Our Savior as it had originally been, and there was much brouhuahua and excitement about it.
I was more than a thousand miles away when the ground was reconsecrated, in a ceremony lasting fifteen hours; the whole deal was televised, and at the time--and it might yet still be--that was the most-watched show on television in that part of the world, from Riga on the Baltic to Vladivostock on the Pacific.
Everybody who was anybody in Russia was there; Boris Yeltsin, Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, Boris Berezovsky, a whole lot of medal-wearing generals and admirals, movie stars, television personalities, literary greats.
I was watching this in the cottage of peasants; at one point, an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair was caught by the cameras, eliciting a great many loud and loathesome curses and expletives from the peasants who were my hosts.
They were really really really hot, really bitter, about this decrepit man.
In fact, I feared one of them was going to do a Chief S itting Bull, and slam his fist through the screen of the television.
I could read Cyrillic, and this was identified as Lazar Kaganovich.
He was 97 years old at the time.
Kaganovich, the contemporary of Stalin, the creator of Khrushchev, the destroyer of 10-12 million Ukrainians.....
This was the mid-1990s, remember; long long long after one had assumed such people were long ago dead.
