The Accountant of Auschwitz: A panel discussion on genocide

The Mosaic Institute and Hot Docs co-screened the film The Accountant of Auschwitz. After, I moderated a panel discussion with experts on the Holocaust, the Rohingya genocide, and Cambodia's killing fields.

The film raises profound questions about the hope of justice after mass atrocities, if large sections of a nation had been complicit and if the descendants of perpetrators and victims must build a shared future together.

Rebecca Wittmann, a professor at the University of Toronto, brought her insights into the Nuremburg Trials, and why justice was frustrated in the German legal system for decades after the Second World War.

Zaitun Hnin Pwint Phyu, a representative of the Rohingya Human Rights Network Canada, argued that the events leading to the Holocaust were repeated through the events leading to the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, as was international inaction.

Sorpong Peou, a professor at Ryerson University, spoke to his personal experience of Cambodia’s killing fields and the Khmer Rouge atrocities, and he warned the audience that the same pattern of ideological polarisation and blind political extremism is at large today.

Since the Holocaust, it has become a rite of passage for political figures to solemnly mouth the phrase, "Never again". Yet, through action and inaction, many of those same figures have allowed mass atrocities to happen, again and again, across the world. Can we break the cycle of complicity in genocide?

This was part of Mosaic's work on post-conflict reconciliation, and on breaking the cycle of inter-generational trauma.