making sense of the senseless

so the news tells us today that the 97 year old Laszlo Csatary was arrested in Hungary. He was responsible for sending over 15,000 human souls to death camps and other assorted cruelties. and it seems the guy has been living in hungary under his own name since around 1997 after being discovered in canada. now he claims he was just following orders that he had to follow.

it's kind of too big to put your head around, isn't it? what do you do with something like this?

one commenter on a news blog thinks "hey, he's old, let him go."

and i'm thinking "what the hell?"

i mean really, that's more compassion than i could sum up for him. and it's one of those cases where you gotta wonder "what would jesus do?" that is, if you believed in jesus. which in fact, considering the scope and horror of the holocaust, it's kind of hard to.

it's also kind of hard to imagine why any jewish person actually believes in a god at all.

what i also wonder about is how if you are this guy - at some point- you didn't crack and say "here i am, i'm turning myself in." i mean, whether you believe in a god or not, how in the heck do you live with yourself if you done something of this magnitude. wouldn't you want someone else to punish you so that you wouldn't have to? or did it seem punishment enough that you had to hold it all in all these years?

or do you just tell yourself "hey, i was in a terrible position, ANY one in my position would have done the same. it was either kill or be killed."

except that this is not true. sure MANY would have, perhaps i can't even think that i wouldn't have if afraid for my life or the lives of my children, but i also know that there are MANY fine people who did risk their lives and did lose their lives standing up against this evil. so it's not that EVERYbody would have done the same.

there was a choice. it might have meant death for yourself, but there was a choice.

and i want to know- was the guy married? is his wife alive? does he have children? if so, how on earth would you reconcile the fact that your husband or your father was a monster?

anyway, this is a tough one for the atheist, because while a person who believes in god can say to themselves that he will be judged by god even if not by the mortals, the person who doesn't believe in god has to feel the immediacy of punishing the guy for what all he did before he ceases to exist. lest he not get any punishment at all.

but then again, where do you draw the line with that? the whole idea of punishment for crimes. because for instance even while i abhor child abusers, i do not consider the reason to incarcerate them to be the punishment aspect, i just want those people away from society where they can't harm another child ever. that's all. (mind you that if i ever found anyone to abuse my children or grandchild, you would have to hold me back from killing them with my bare hands, but that's vengeance, not punishment) but if you follow that punishment logic, the odds of this guy ever harming another human being are beyond slim and at nothing. he's 97 for pete's sake. and he holds no power anywhere. so what's he going to do to hurt someone now? so it would be different if he'd have been caught, 50 years or so ago, i guess.

so what do you do with the guy? i have to say that i just don't know. i guess, take him to court. maybe the trial will raise the consciousness of people once again of the need to always stand up against evil where-ever you can and whenever you are called to. a kind of "don't be this guy" sort of thing.

that's the only sense i can make out it all.