RETIRED BBC broadcaster Robin Lustig has told why he features in a film about the failure to prosecute most of those responsible for the Holocaust - and plans to attend its world premiere in York.
The documentary film, ‘Getting Away With Murder(s,)' will be screened at Everyman cinema in Blossom Street on September 9, with York Liberal Jewish Community co-hosting the event.
Filmmaker David Wilkinson has said that his premieres are normally held either in London or at one of the prestigious film festivals, such as Sundance or Edinburgh, but he felt York was most appropriate because filming took place at Clifford’s Tower, where, in 1190, the city’s Jewish population committed mass suicide rather than wait to be killed by a mob.
The film claims a million people were involved in the murder of 11 million innocent men, women and children in the 20th century Holocaust, but 99 per cent escaped justice.
Mr Lustig, former presenter of Radio 4 programmes such as The World Tonight and File on 4,said he was filmed in Lithuania because his grandmother,Ilse Cohn, was murdered there, along with 137,000 other Jews.
He said that on November 29, 1941, Ilse was shot in a field members of the Nazi death squad Einsatzkommando 3, under the command of a Swiss-born SS colonel called Karl Jäger.
He said that on that day alone, they murdered 2,000 Jews who had been deported by train from Vienna and from his grandmother's hometown of Breslau.
He knew his grandmother's fate because three days after she was shot, Jäger submitted a report to his superiors, listing in meticulous detail the number of Jews he had ordered to be killed each day over the previous six months.
He said Jäger managed to escape being captured at the end of the war, but was eventually arrested in 1959. However, he then hanged himself while awaiting trial.
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