At the very moment the last survivors – and legal witnesses – were dying, a criminal investigation in Latvia put hard-won facts about the Holocaust on the line. Then journalist Linda Kinstler discovered that a Nazi, 50 years dead and from the same killing unit as her grandfather, could be pardoned by the proceedings.

Nominated for the 2023 Wingate Prize, the probing and profound Come to This Court & Cry: How the Holocaust Ends investigates both family story, the nature of memory and the archives of ten nations to examine what it takes to prove history in our uncertain century. In conversation with historian Anne Sebba.

Linda Kinstler is a contributing writer for The Economist’s 1843 Magazine and a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley. Her writing appears in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Wired, and elsewhere. She was previously a Marshall Scholar in the UK, where she covered British politics for the Atlantic and studied with Forensic Architecture.

Anne Sebba is an award winning biographer, historian and author of eleven books. Her latest book is Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy published in the UK and US in 2021.

In 2016 Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940’s was the winner of the 2016 Franco-British Society book prize. Previously Anne wrote That Woman, a biography of Wallis Simpson and the scandal of the 1936 abdication crisis based on her discovery of a secret cache of letters.

A former Reuters Foreign Correspondent, Anne is a broadcaster and regularly appears on television talking about her books. She is a former chair of Britain’s 10,000 strong Society of Authors and lecturer who gives talks to a variety of audiences in the US and UK as well as on cruises and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research.