Judgment Before Nuremberg,

tells how the Nazis slaughtered nearly one million Jews in Ukraine, 

up close--by gunfire

before the gas chambers at Auschwitz

were even in operation. 

On December 15, 2011, the author returned to Kharkov, Ukraine. 

On that bitterly cold day, 70 years before, his mother and her family were forced on a march “to a labor camp.”  When Zhanna’s father realized this was a march “to nowhere,” he bribed a guard to look away as his oldest daughter jumped out of line.

Zhanna watched as her parents, grandparents and 16,000 other Jews took their final steps toward the edge of a ravine called Drobitsky Yar.

Greg walked among their remains and visited the underground memorial at the site.  Much to the shock of everyone he told the museum’s guide that two of the names inscribed among the dead belonged to people who were very much alive--his mother, Zhanna and her sister, Frina.  They are the only known survivors of this massacre.

 A small picture in a local Jewish museum stunned the author.  It was the scene of four men hanging in the public square.

The men were three Nazi officers and one Ukrainian collaborator who were tried, convicted and hung for war crimes in Kharkov. 

The date--December 1943--

two years after the Nazis killed Dawson’s ancestors

and two years before the end of the war.