Guiora - The Crime of Complicity: the Bystander in the Holocaust

Join Amos Guiora on his personal journey back to the Holocaust to understand the complicity of bystanders who watched his father on a death march in Serbia, his mother and grandmother being lined up to be executed in Budapest, and his grandparents waiting on a platform for the train that would take them to their deaths at Auschwitz. Guiora asks whether such bystanders had a legal duty to intervene and, if so, what actions were they required to take. This book will force you to ask yourself a lot of difficult questions about what you would do as such a bystander and whether you would have the courage to act.

Daniel C. Barr, Perkins Coie LLP, Phoenix, Arizona

As the only son of Viennese Jewish Holocaust refugees, I find a book on this subjectespecially by a distinguished law professorto be inherently interesting. What I discovered further in reading through the fascinating text is that this particular book is also quickly galvanizing and impressively original. In a field that has already been examined endlessly by scholars and others, Guioras book remains both imaginative and important. Should bystanders be regarded as complicit for pertinent forms of nonintervention? How shall we best explain the bystanders (all-too-common) decision not to intervene? These are plainly difficult questions to answer; yet the author offers an assessment that is uniformly competent and thoroughly purposeful and that builds a compelling jurisprudential argument for treating various forms of bystander complicity as a distinctly punishable crime. I am delighted to celebrate this brilliant book with great intellectual enthusiasm.

Louis Ren Beres, professor emeritus
of international law,
Purdue University

Amos Guioras The Crime of Complicity should make any bystander who sees violence against another and chooses to do nothing about it shudder. He recounts in depth the suffering of his family in death marches and concentration camp agony, watched by Eastern Europeans who looked the other way, to campus rape watchers who did nothing. Ripe for debate, Guiora argues that those who watch violence have a greater duty not to remain silent, and that legislation imposing that duty to protect the innocent might be necessary. Guiora is masterful in personalizing the pain with academic vicarious liability theory.

Avery Friedman, CNN legal analyst

Amos Guiora has written an important book. Rooted in family history scarred by Nazi persecution and through his personal journey to understand the whys of the past, this book contends that bystanders inaction was the essence of the Holocaust. With this insight, he carefully builds a case that moral obligation alone cannot secure justice. Rather, in history and in our contemporary world, bystanders must be judged for their complicity and held accountable by the state for refusing to protect the innocent from harm. This is a necessary addition to the literature on collective responsibility and guilt.

Robert A. Goldberg, professor of history,
University of Utah

In asking simple questions, Amos Guiora elaborates the knowledge and conduct of the individual bystander during the Holocaust. He explains the role of the bystander in relation to the perpetrator and victim in such a way that the reader with no profound knowledge about the Holocaust is able to understand the issue. He has written an impressive, very accessible book for the general public that shows how the decision of the bystander to not intervene in the face of situations of imminent harm accentuates the victims vulnerability with disastrous consequences.

Fred Grnfeld, professor emeritus of
international relations and human rights,
Maastricht University and Utrecht University

The Crime of Complicity is a multi-layered work. It combines personal memoir, historical research, legal opinion, and a moral ethical challenge. In this time of renewed hate speech, intolerance, bullying, and profiling, Amos Guioras book is a hard read, but it brings us face-to-face with an issue we cannot ignore except at our peril.

Rev. Dr. John C. Lentz, Jr., senior pastor,
Forest Hill Church, Presbyterian,
Cleveland and author of Lukes Portrait of Paul