Having made it to the very ripe old age of 103 last month, Ben Ferencz’s death Friday night has been marked in detailed obituaries of an amazing life that brought him from a Jewish infant fleeing Eastern European antisemitism with his family to the tenements and streets of New York to a world war to the world stage and to the halls of Congress.
We were fortunate to have known and admired Ben for many years and were glad to have celebrated this New Yorker who made a difference for the whole world.
As we’ve recounted, his sharp mind was recognized early in public school and he was sent to Townsend Harris High School with the brightest boys in the city for its three years accelerated curriculum and automatic admission to City College, for an accelerated three years there, completing eight years of free public education in six.
Ferencz then entered law school at age 20 in 1940 and after graduating was a buck private in Patton’s Third Army. He became a war crime investigator and was later a Nuremberg prosecutor of the monsters of the Einsatzgruppen, the German mobile killing squads who murdered more than a million Soviet Jews. The biggest murder trial in history was Ferencz’s first case and using the Germans’ own reports on the tally of the murdered and a single witness, a French officer as a handwriting expert, he convicted all the defendants, several of whom hanged.
He then spent most of the next decade in Germany, fighting for restitution for Jewish victims of the genocide before he and his family returned to New York.
Under his twin mottos, “Law. Not War” and “Never give up,” Ferencz was instrumental, after decades of pushing, in the creation of the International Criminal Court. At age 91, he gave the closing statement at the ICC’s first prosecution.
There are busts of Ben at the ICC and Nuremberg and the U.S. awarded him its highest honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, that we happily urged. Pretty good for a refugee kid from New York.
