Delivering the Toronto Star, I marched each day past a small, neat brick house with a manicured lawn and a red and-white striped garage door in which Helmut Rauca lived in obscurity.

On June 18, 1982 our quiet neighborhood was jolted by the news that the RCMP had arrested Rauca, Canada's first-ever captured war criminal, a person responsible for killing thousands of Jews. There I was learning about the Holocaust in school, in some cases from teachers who had themselves survived the camps as children, and at almost the same time I was innocently passing by Rauca's manicured lawn and his red and white striped garage door every afternoon.

Frenzied television news camped out on the street and reported over and over the horrible details of grisly mass murders he was accused of having carried out. In November of that year an Ontario court ruled that the Constitution did not protect Rauca, who had long ago obtained Canadian citizenship, from deportation to Germany to face prosecution. And so, in May 1982, Rauca was deported to Frankfurt to be tried for the murder of 11,584 Jewish men, women and children in Kaunas, Lithuania. Rauca died five months later while awaiting trial. (See archival footage of the Rauca case, including interviews with witnesses who survived the Kaunas ghetto, here. First broadcast on November 4, 1982.)

Something else significant happened in the summer of 1982 while Rauca was being deported for his crime---although at the time it was completely unknown to me. Two reporters writing a piece for the Montreal Gazette magazine were putting the finishing touches on a story about another WWII war criminal who had slipped into Canada decades before and had escaped justice for his role in the murder of thousands of Jews in Latvia. That man was Haralds Puntulis. The reporters had gathered evidence showing that among the many Jews and Roma he had killed during the WWII, he was responsible for the murder of the inhabitants of my grandfather's entire shtetl, 381 Jews, including all the remaining members of my grandfather's family.

I learned of this Montreal Gazette article in the fall of 2003. In the course of a ten-year long genealogical research project, I interviewed one of the writers, Jeff Ansell, and I learned another shocking detail: Haralds Puntilis lived just two miles away from the house I grew up. In fact during my childhood, Haralds Puntilis, butcher of the Jews of Ribinishki and nearby villages, lived just off the route we most often took to drive from our suburban house to my grandfather's house in downtown Toronto.

To be continued....

PART ONE OF THIS STORY HERE.