Look at this picture: she is Eva Mozes Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, extending her hand to Oskar Gröning, a former SS officer in the camp. The setting: a district court in Lüneburg, Germany, where Gröning was accused of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews. Date: April 2015.

The picture is a conundrum: why would an Auschwitz survivor extend forgiveness to her former captor? Kor’s parents and two of her siblings had perished there. She and her twin sister Miriam had endured the deadly human experiments of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death.”

During his trial, Gröning accepted “responsibility in front of God” for what he did at Auschwitz, but he rejected any criminal responsibility. Perhaps so as not to implicate himself further, he refused to show remorse or apologize.

For this and other reasons, none of Kor’s fifty-two co-plaintiffs in the case against the former SS officer followed her lead in publicly forgiving him. Many condemned her for the act.

When I chanced upon the photograph, though, I knew right away why Kor had forgiven Gröning. For I had heard her explain, years earlier, why.

In 2013 Kor came to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum to sign her book Surviving the Angel of Death. I work as a tour guide, and I happened to be in Auschwitz on that day, too, leading a European excursion. While my group was with a museum guide, I wandered around the complex. I eventually found myself in a tiny auditorium. A short, stocky woman stood at the front. “I have a simple message to share with you today,” she said in a calm, confident voice. “The day I was liberated from the camp was not the 27^th of January 1945, when the Russians arrived, but forty years later, when I learned to forgive Mengele. Only through forgiveness was I able to finally walk out the gate of this camp.”

I had come to Auschwitz sixteen times before. I had absorbed countless guided tours and survivors’ accounts. As harrowing and powerful as they were, none of them had the same impact on me as Kor’s words did that day.

In her book, Kor describes the emotional process that eventually brought her to the decision to forgive her former captors. Before that act, her hatred had been consuming her, she writes. “I came to hate my own parents. As a child you expect your parents to protect you. My parents could not do that. I came to hate them for that.”

Kor was only ten years old when her family was sent to Auschwitz. Only Kor and her twin sister Miriam survived the camp. They returned to their native Romania and lived there for several years before emigrating to Israel. In 1960 Kor married an American Holocaust survivor, and the couple relocated to the US. The broadcast of the 1978 NBC miniseries The Holocaust inspired Kor and her sister to track down other survivors of Mengele’s experiments, and in 1984 she founded the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in her adopted hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana. Her goal has been to share what she lived through at the camp, and what she has done since then to make sense of those traumatic memories.

According to Kor—who is now eighty-four—the act of forgiveness is not so much about perpetrators, but survivors—about finding a way to release those who suffered at the hands of the Nazis from being trapped in an often self-destructive hatred. Up until the moment she met Gröning, though, Kor’s forgiveness existed in the abstract. She had never had a chance to face Mengele, the monster who had managed to escape justice until the very end. (Mengele died in Brazil in 1979.) For Kor, I imagine, Gröning was, to an extent, Mengele’s proxy.

The photo of Kor embracing Gröning contains another riddle: why did it take seventy years for the former SS officer to be tried in his home country?

After the war, the United Nations War Crimes Commission took the lead in seeking out justice for the victims of the Holocaust. While it lacked the authority to prosecute war criminals, the commission helped bring indictments against 36,000 German and Japanese personnel between 1943 and 1949. The defendants were tried in tribunals set up by individual countries as well as internationally. The most publicized of these were the year-long Nuremberg trials.

Nuremberg was not without its critics. In Germany, the press portrayed the hearings as an attempt to humiliate the country. In 1958, German chancellor Konrad Adenauer set up the Zentrale Stelle—the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. Like the UN War Crimes Commission, the Central Office was tasked with bringing former Nazis to justice, but unlike the commission, it was a homegrown effort—what German historian Annette Weinke calls a ”counter-project against Nuremberg.” “We wanted to take the past into our own hands,” Weinke told the Guardian.

West German policy at the time favored amnesty and the reintegration of former Nazis. There were no special provisions to try individuals for war crimes. Nevertheless, with the help of the Central Office, in 1963 a Frankfurt district court charged twenty-two former Auschwitz guards for murder. The proceedings, which lasted for two years, attracted wide media coverage.

What quickly became clear during the Frankfurt trials was that the country had changed. A generation that had not directly experienced the war was now running things. This generation was asking uncomfortable questions of their reticent elders, trying to figure out why their apparently nice parents and grandparents had participated in mass murder.

Ultimately, seventeen of the twenty-two former guards were convicted. Six were given life sentences.

Yet, the understanding of war crimes that prevailed during the Frankfurt trials was a very limited one. Prosecutors were permitted to try individuals only for willful manslaughter, not for abetting mass murder by obeying orders. Fritz Bauer, the chief judge who presided over the trials, would later complain, “Because the media treated the accused in such a manner as to imply that they were all freakish monsters, it became possible for the German public to distance themselves from feeling moral guilt about what had happened at Auschwitz.”

This popular view—that the Holocaust was the work of few sick people who were not at all like normal Germans—eventually stymied the work of the Central Office. In 1969, the German high court overturned a conviction of an Auschwitz dentist on the grounds that working at the concentration camp was not a crime in itself. As a result, prosecutors were forced to drop an investigation into the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), the organization most directly responsible for implementing the Nazi regime’s policy of mass murder. It was a “perpetrator-friendly approach,” Weinke, the historian, says. “In a way, they were exonerating these crimes.” Afterward, the work of the Central Office stalled. For the next four decades, it largely receded from public view.

Then, a seemingly unrelated court case in 2007 changed Germany’s judicial landscape. While studying in Hamburg, Mounir el Motassadeq, a Moroccan national, had wired money to Marwan al-Shehhi, one of the hijackers involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Based on evidence that he was aware of the plot, a Hamburg court sentenced Motassadeq to fifteen years in prison. In laying out their case, prosecutors put forward a more expansive understanding of criminal culpability for murder, which prevailed across all of Motassadeq’s 246 counts of being an accessory to murder—one count for every passenger aboard the four flights hijacked that day.

Central Office lawyer Thomas Walther believed the logic of the Motassadeq ruling could be applied to cases against Nazi war criminals. He first used this legal strategy in the case against John Demjanjuk, a former SS guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland. Demjanjuk became the lowest-ranking Nazi ever tried in Germany for war crimes. In 2011, a court in Munich found Demjanjuk guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews, the number of people slaughtered in Sobibor during the four months he served there in 1943. Demjanjuk appealed the case and died a year later in a Bavarian nursing home—still a free man, given that in Germany a conviction does not legally hold if an appeal is still pending.

The Munich ruling was based solely on evidence that Demjanjuk had worked at the Sobibor death camp—not that he had committed a specific crime. This opened the possibility of prosecuting other living Nazis. In 2013, the Central Office prepared a list of thirty former Auschwitz personnel who could now be indicted. Only five were ever brought before a court—the others were either deemed unfit to stand trial for health reasons, or died in the interim. And of those five, so far only Oskar Gröning has had his case make it all the way through the system.

Gröning was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to four years in prison. Last January, the German high court rejected his final legal option, a request for clemency. Two months later, Gröning died, at the age of ninety-six. He never served time in prison, but he died a convicted criminal. In the history of prosecuting low-level German war criminals, this was a first.

Born in 1921, Gröning grew up in a fiercely patriotic German family. His father was a member of the radical Stahlhelm organization. Young Oskar became a member of its youth branch, and when the Nazis came to power, he transferred to the Hitler Youth. A few years later, despite his poor constitution, his application to the SS, the elite Nazi security force, was accepted. A bank clerk by profession, he requested a treasurer position and was duly appointed a bookkeeper in Auschwitz in 1942.

His work involved sorting the foreign cash taken from those arriving at the camp. For a three-month window, Gröning also helped process prisoners on the arrival ramp as they got off the trains. He stayed at Auchwitz until 1944. Shortly afterward, Gröning was captured on the Western front and taken as a prisoner to England, where he waited out the war and—according to his own account—spent the years immediately after happily performing as part of a singing troupe.

When he returned to Germany in 1948, Gröning—like many other Nazis—refused to speak about what had happened at the concentration camps. “Girl, do both of us a favor,” he told his wife. “Don’t ask.” Years later, he would recall another incident from that time:

I was staying with my father and my stepmother’s parents. At dinner the grandmother made a stupid remark about Auschwitz and implied, “You’re a potential, or even a real, murderer, and yet you are allowed to sit with us at the table. You are here only on sufferance.” I exploded and banged my fist on the table and said, “Now listen well—this word, and this connection, are never, ever to be mentioned again in my presence, or I’ll move out!”

It took forty years before Gröning was ready to acknowledge his “connection” to the mass killings. In the late 1980s, he was a regular at a local philatelist club. At one meeting, he met a man who denied it was possible to burn so many corpses at once, as had been done in Auschwitz. Later, that same man sent Gröning a pamphlet that argued the Holocaust had never taken place. Gröning returned it with comments in the margins. “I saw the crematoria,” he wrote. “I saw the open fires. I was on the ramp when the selections took place. I would like you to believe that these atrocities happened, because I was there.”

But in his mind, Gröning was innocent of any crime. As he saw it, he was merely a “witness” to history. He played that role in the years that followed. He testified as a witness against a member of the SS accused of having murdered inmates at Auschwitz. He took part in a high-profile BBC documentary series on Auschwitz that was broadcast in 2005. Later that same year, the German newspaper Der Spiegel published an interview with Gröning to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war.

In the Der Spiegel interview, Gröning describes how his family lived next door to a Jewish-owned iron goods shop. The owner’s daughter used to play marbles with Gröning on the street. One day, men from the SA—an early Nazi paramilitary organization—protested outside the shop, holding up a sign that read “Germans, do not buy from Jews.” After that incident, Gröning tells the interviewer, he and his friend started playing in the courtyard instead of the street.

“What were you thinking when the men from the SA held up the sign?” the interviewer asks.

“Nothing, nothing at all,” Gröning replies.

At another point in the interview, Gröning recalls a line from an anti-Semitic song he knew in his youth: “And when Jewish blood begins to drip from our knives, things will be good again.” He quickly adds: “Back then we didn’t even think about what we were singing.”

Gröning’s words bring to mind the attitude of Adolph Eichmann, the SS leader who oversaw the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” During his 1961 Jerusalem trial—which would end with Eichmann’s conviction and hanging—the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt had a chance to observe Eichmann while writing a piece for the New Yorker magazine. Eichmann, she famously wrote, exemplified the “banality of evil.” At no point did he realize what he was doing, and this “lack of imagination, remoteness from reality, and thoughtlessness” was the root of the Nazi genocide, she argued.

The BBC documentary series does not mention the phrase “banality of evil,” but its producer, Lawrence Rees, ends up echoing Arendt in his final assessment of the talkative former SS guard: “The most terrifying thing about Gröning is that he is a totally ordinary person.”

At another point in the BBC documentary, the interviewer asks Gröning whether he finds it “unfair” that “those who suffered continue to have a hard time,” while someone like him, who tended to the machinery of those mass killings, “now has a good life.” Gröning replies:

It’s always like that in this world. Should I wear a hair shirt for the rest of my life and live off roots and charity, like in the opera Tannhäuser, because I belonged to that organization? Unless you think that’s an option, then all that’s left is for each person to have the freedom to make the best of the situation he’s in.

The point of Tannhäuser—miraculous redemption through grace, rather than deserved damnation for sin—was apparently lost on Gröning. In any case, his generation largely followed the advice “to make the best of the situation.” They took a destroyed country and quickly transformed it back into the economic powerhorse of Europe. Perhaps they worked so hard in order to forget—the intensity of their work directly proportional to a collectively willed amnesia.

In his interviews, Gröning continually presents his younger self as ignorant and manipulated, but not a wanton killer. Only after the war did he come to realize the monstrosity of the undertaking in which he had participated, he says. As you listen to him speak, you might easily believe there is no connection between the young man photographed in his SS uniform and the amiable elderly gentleman who sits there, on camera, in a claret pullover.

Here Gröning reflects a more extreme version of a mindset I first encountered when I was an exchange student in an Ohio high school back in 1991. My roommate and closest friend Gereon, the son of a lawyer and high school history teacher in Bonn, would proudly lay claim to the postwar democratic success of Germany—and, with heartfelt admiration, credit the US for that success. Yet, Gereon would say nothing about what had happened during and before the war. It was as if his Germany had not existed back then. For him, shared national identity had started in 1945.

My childhood was shaped by opposite circumstances. While my native Czechoslovakia had been defiantly democratic before and immediately after the war years, it fell under the totalitarian rule of communism in 1948. I grew up regarding whatever happened in the public sphere as an unwanted imposition on our private lives—what the Czech poet Karel Šiktanc called a darmoděj, something that “happens in vain.”

My regular afternoon visits to both of my grandparents’ homes were journeys across time and culture. My maternal grandparents’ apartment in Dejvice literally smelled of the 1930s. The house my paternal grandfather had completed in 1949—just weeks before he was dismissed from his post at the transportation ministry—was a veritable ark in the muddied torrents of time. I found these visits liberating because they recalled those earlier years of freedom, the period that had shaped my grandparents’ attitudes and moral compass. As I saw it, our Czechoslovak collective history had ended at about the same time that Gereon’s German one had begun.

On the very first day of Gröning’s trial, Kor went up to him in the district courtroom in Lüneburg. Her initial attempt to connect failed: Gröning fainted. (“I knocked out an old Nazi,” she later quipped.) Only on a second try did the two manage a hug and a short conversation, captured in Kor’s Twitter feed.

In a public statement afterward, Kor explained her motivation:

I know many people will criticize me for this photo, but so be it. For the life of me I will never understand why anger is preferable to a goodwill gesture. Nothing good ever comes from anger. Any goodwill gesture in my book will win over anger any time. The energy that anger creates is a violent energy.

My forgiveness has nothing to do with the perpetrators. It is an act of self-healing, self-liberation, and self-empowerment.

I wonder, though, whether Kor’s forgiveness was really about rejecting her anger. In the West we are used to thinking in terms of dualities—that forgiveness, for example, is the opposite of anger. Within Buddhism, however, the Mahayana sutras speak of forgiveness as a special kind of anger. Anger is encouraged with the conviction that it will eventually transform into compassion. Compassion without anger, then, is like a rocket without fuel.

In any case, Kor clearly had larger aims than just forgiving one man. The media coverage of her act was important, given that she wanted Gröning and others like him to speak publicly about what they had done. When those who wrong others no longer feel the wrath of their victims, they may stop insisting on defending themselves. They may then reveal aspects of themselves, and of the larger historical record, that might help their victims to heal. As Kor said in her courtroom testimony: “My forgiveness does not absolve the perpetrator from taking responsibility for his actions. Neither does it diminish my need to know what happened there.”

The prosecutions of former SS officers, Kor argued later in the trial, should stop. It was more important that any Nazis still alive come forward. Toward the end of their lives, she reasoned, more Nazis would be willing to talk. These sorts of trials would only discourage them from doing so.

At the end of Gröning’s trial in Lüneburg, state prosecutor Thomas Walther said in his closing statement that the process had brought healing:

A latent fear accompanied the co-plaintiffs on their way to Lüneburg. Some had initially not wanted to come here at all. But those who were able to build sufficient trust, and who embarked on the journey, have undergone a very strong and intense transformation—all of the co-plaintiffs who came, without an exception. In them, an entirely new image of Germany has evolved. The co-plaintiffs noticed the respect with which they were treated. In court, they witnessed the search for justice: … officers in German uniforms … who would protect them from any threat; the German public, with its repeated, spontaneous, and positive attention in public spaces; representatives of the media; the mayor of Lüneburg—they have all contributed to this strong transformation of latent fear into trust.

For me, though, the significance of the trial has more to do with its impact on those outside the courtroom. In an essay in the German newspaper Die Welt, Peter Huth makes a convincing case that bringing Gröning to justice was not really about putting an old man in prison, but about putting things right in the moral universe—making it clear that what Gröning did, and what many German “grandparents” did, was terribly wrong. “Of course, one does not know how one would have behaved in those circumstances—as if this were a category in itself,” Huth writes. “And at the end this will be argued with one’s grandparents. All nice people who look like Gröning were perhaps like Gröning. What is happening to him can be regarded a collective punishment.”

I imagine Gröning fought his legal battle to the very end because he sincerely believed he was defending not just his own honor, but that of his entire family. I have no doubt he was a perfectly nice grandpa, or at least tried to be.

As I see it, the Lüneburg ruling has erased the clear boundaries that once existed between guilt and non-guilt in our postwar world. There are millions in Germany and formerly occupied Europe—including my home country—to whom the legal precedent established there might extend. Some of these “grandparents” would, like Gröning, get four years in prison. Some, by a precise calculus of guilt, would get a couple seconds. Few people, if any, will actually wind up serving any time. The point is, a court of law has spoken on this matter, and millions are now forced to recognize that they, too, share responsibility for the orders they obeyed. When they die, their grandkids may need to confront that responsibility as well—so that they themselves can move on.

Jan Vihan Jan Vihan is a contributing writer for In The Fray.