Volume 31, Number 13 · August 16, 1984
Who Cares?
By Roger Rosenblatt
The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience
by William Shawcross
Simon and Schuster, 464 pp., $19.95
When William Shawcross investigated relief work in Cambodia after the Vietnamese invasion of 1979 and the defeat of the Khmer Rouge it may have seemed a part of his family inheritance. His father was the British chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials; as a boy Shawcross would play a 78-rpm recording of his father's summation speech to the tribunal, repeating the account of a German engineer who had witnessed the slaughter of hundreds of Jews at Dubno. He quotes from this terrible recording early in The Quality of Mercy, and it serves as part ghost and part muse to the book. Hitler's exterminations and the refugees created by the Second World War gave rise and shape to many of the humanitarian organizations whose work in Cambodia Shawcross deals with here, and much of his inquiry centers on how these organizations were able to respond to the holocaust created by the Khmer Rouge.
Review, 2358 words
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