Called to Testify

How does a secular, non-practising Jew who has lived most of her life outside the Jewish community suddenly find herself in the front rows of a Nazi war crimes tribunal? In 2015, the award-winning writer Judith Kalman was invited to Lüneburg to testify at the trial of Oskar Gröning, accused of facilitating 300,000 murders at Auschwitz. She appeared on behalf of a relative she had never met, a child of her father’s first marriage, who died in the camp.Kalman not only found herself in the una