Make it Count: An Extraordinary 100-Year-Old Man’s Nine Lessons for Living a Life to be Proud Of
By Benjamin Ferencz
Sphere, UK
ISBN: 978-0751579925
160pp.

Some people are born privileged. Others have to struggle for basic needs such as food and education. Some are lucky to achieve what they desire. Others must make do without and give up on their hopes, dreams and aspirations. Then there are those so deprived that they can’t even afford to dream.

Benjamin Ferencz was a person to whom the adage ‘from rags to riches’ was truly applicable. He was the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials when he passed away in April of this year, at the age of 103. The book Make it Count: An Extraordinary 100-Year-Old Man’s Nine Lessons for Living a Life to be Proud Of is based on interviews Ferencz gave to Nadia Khomami, a journalist for The Guardian.

The story of the centenarian who lived life to its remarkable fullest begins in March 1920, when Ferencz was born to a Jewish family in Transylvania — a country that stopped existing when it ceded to Romania after World War I. When he was nine months old, his family moved to the United States in a bid to escape anti-Semitism.

He was late in starting school, but showed such aptitude that a teacher advised him to enrol at an institute for gifted children, where passing all courses ensured automatic admission to The City College of New York — an immense opportunity for a boy of minimal means.

Ferencz then won a scholarship to Harvard Law School, where he researched war crimes. In 2014 — 71 years after he graduated — he was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the university’s highest honour in legal activism, for “a lifetime’s work advocating for accountability and justice.”

A book based on interviews of the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials, who passed away recently, is a tale of resilience in the face of adversity and a source of inspiration

In 1943, right after graduating as a lawyer, Ferencz enlisted as a soldier in the US army. He fought in the Battle of Normandy, amongst other fronts, and won a slew of honours in his military career. Towards the end of the Second World War, he witnessed scenes of death and inhumanity in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps.

After his honourable discharge from the military, Ferencz returned to New York to practise law. In 1946, he was asked to join the American war crimes unit for the Nuremberg trials, in which capacity he prosecuted 22 leading Nazis. He led efforts to return seized property to Holocaust survivors, participated in repatriation negotiations between Israel and Germany, and played an important role in the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which holds war criminals the world over to account.

Make it Count is divided into nine chapters, each chapter dealing with one facet of life. Ferencz also shares nine invaluable lessons he learned on how we can make the most of our lives.

Growing up in New York’s district of Hell’s Kitchen was not easy. Back then, the area was renowned for poverty and crime but, rather than deter him, it made Ferencz all the more determined. He says, “My interest in crime prevention came from the whole atmosphere in which I was raised,” adding, “Whatever situation you come from, believe that you can do something different if you want to. I am living proof that you don’t have to follow the crowd.”

Although a firm believer that one could learn anything from anywhere, he regarded his college experience highly: “It was there I realised the value of education. We can, and should, learn wherever we are, but the doors [that] institutional education open up for us should not be underestimated.”

His prestigious Harvard degree served him well, but it did not guarantee exemption from difficulties and injustice during his career. His army duties included scrubbing toilets and washing dishes. Later, when he was due to receive a medal, his name was struck off the list of designees because of a petty issue. At that point he realised that one would likely “always have adversaries and you won’t always get your just reward.”

A ‘just reward’ showed up soon enough, though, when he was transferred to Gen George Patton’s Third Army headquarters, which had received orders to set up a war crimes unit. The lesson Ferencz leaves here is, “The path is always bumpy, never straight.”

Although Ferencz saw scenes of indescribable horror during his visits to the concentration camps in Germany, in his opening statement at Nuremberg he said, “Vengeance is not our goal.” He believed that if you became what you hated, “you will become someone’s enemy and the cycle will go on endlessly.”

Mindful of being Jewish himself and not wanting the trial to be painted as Jewish vengeance, he gave his final cross examination of his lead defendant — Gen Otto Ohlendorf, who green-lit the deaths of 90,000 Jews — to someone else.

Ferencz’s ambition was to ensure crime did not go unpunished. He fought hard to set up the ICC and met success in July 1998, when 120 countries adopted the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The lesson from this chapter is to act “in the interest of the people who will inherit what you have done”, and that “if you can’t reach an answer which is satisfactory, you can push the rock a little further up the hill. Increase the pressure … Never give up.”

Ferencz believed in speaking the truth even when no one wanted to hear it. He also believed in love. He had fought on the battlefields and brought war criminals to task but, as he says, sometimes there are things even more important than saving the world. For him, his “most important victory” was winning his wife’s affections. She was his childhood sweetheart and they spent a good life together for 73 years before she passed away in 2019.

With more than a hundred years behind him, Ferencz realised life was not perfect, “especially when we have seen horrors or hardships, or it’s hard to be truly happy all the time. But we can find contentment in the realities.” He was satisfied with the full life he had led, was grateful for his wonderful wife and proud of his four well-educated, socially minded children.

About the future, he says, “The future is unpredictable and best laid plans go awry. Keep a weather eye on the horizon but most importantly, be present: your hands are needed on the wheel most of all and the future has a habit of taking care of itself.”

Written in simple words as if one were telling a story, Make it Count is full of gems of wisdom and can serve as a source of inspiration for all. The greatest lesson one takes home after reading the book is that one should never lose hope. Everything gets better as long as one keeps moving forward. Anyone who thinks that things have never been worse, or will never improve, would do well to read the story of Benjamin Ferencz.

The reviewer is a freelance journalist and tweets @naqviriz

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 25th, 2023