Can't step twice into the same Holocaust

In his youth, Sandor Kepiro was a Hungarian Nazi who evidently took part in a massacre of 1200 Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies in the Yugoslav city of Novi Sad in 1942. Astonishingly, he was actually tried and convicted for this atrocity, in 1944, but the conviction was quashed and he escaped to Argentina. He returned to Hungary in 1996, was smoked out by the Simon Wiesenthal hunters, and is now, at the age of ninety-seven, on trial in Budapest as a war criminal.

Naturally, Mr. Kepiro denies that he did anything wrong. (The sign he's holding accuses the court: "Murderers of a 97-year-old man!") And indeed, one must wonder: is this really the same man? Heraclitis famously argued that we can never step twice into the same river, because the water has changed; and it is equally true that we have changed. Mr. Kepiro not only says he did nothing wrong; he may even believe it. Suppose the court gives him a life sentence for murder! (Hungary has abolished the death penalty.) What does a life sentence mean when you are ninety-seven, for a crime you supposedly committed when you were twenty-eight years old, when not a single cell in your body remains the same, and your mind has no recollection of it? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford