As a young teen-ager on Long Island, one of my favorite places to hang out was a neighborhood candy store called the Sugar Bowl. It still exists, and you can go there to buy a newspaper, a pack of smokes, or a lottery ticket.

But in the early 1960s, it was a kid's paradise, where you could buy baseball cards, a soda fountain drink, comic books, or cheap toys, like rubber spiders or water pistols. As young adolescents, we graduated to the magazine shelves and a rotating rack that carried the day's popular paperback books. From this rack I once picked out a pictorial biography of Marilyn Monroe, which was confiscated by my parents.

A more serious book caught my attention in 1961. It was titled Nuremberg Diary. The cover showed a photograph of the Nazi war criminals on trial. A small, red swastika stood out against a black background. A blurb read: "The shocking exposure of the Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials which offers a deep insight into the distorted minds of the men who led the Third Reich to victory -- and infamous defeat." The book cost me 75 cents -- the price of several Superman comics -- but I found it too alluring to pass up.

The hardback version, I would discover, was published in 1947, the year after the trials, the year before I was born. The author, G.M. Gilbert, an Army captain, served as prison psychologist to the Nazi war criminals. He visited the prisoners in their cells, tried to prevent their suicides (one hanged himself early in the proceedings), administered psychological tests, and gained their confidence. Because he also spoke German, he was in a special position to interview them, gauge their reactions, hear their complaints and study their personalities and character.

Nuremberg Diary endures as one of the most valuable documents on the dark soul of German fascism.

If I wasn't playing baseball or basketball, I was reading. I can see myself now as a 13-year-old, sitting in the crowded seventh-grade classroom of St. Aidan's School, reading Nuremberg Diary. Its contents so upset me that, on one occasion, I snapped the book shut and restrained myself from hurling it out the window.

My outrage was enflamed by the details of Nazi atrocities.

One photograph showed a pile of human bones and ashes, "results of one day's work in the concentration camp at Weimar, Germany."

On Nov. 29, 1945, early in the trial, the Nazis were brought in to the courtroom to view documentary footage of film shot at liberated concentration camps. As the prisoners watched the atrocity film, they, in turn, were watched by Army psychologists.

"Fritzsche already looks pale and sits aghast as it starts with scenes of prisoners burned alive in a barn. . . . Hess keeps looking bewildered. . . . piles of dead are shown in a slave labor camp. . . . Sauckel shudders at pictures of Buchenwald crematorium oven. . . . Ribbentrop looks up to screen as British officer begins to speak, saying he has already buried 17,000 corpses. . . . Funk crying bitterly, claps hand over mouth as women's naked corpses are thrown into pit. . . . Keitel and Ribbentrop look up at mention of tractor clearing corpses, see it, then hang their heads."

The trial record contains photographs of children held at Auschwitz for sadistic medical experiments, of naked Jewish women being herded past German troops, of the harvesting of women's hair, of gold extracted from the teeth of murdered concentration camp prisoners.

The book had more than 400 pages of dramatic detail, leading up to the execution of 10 Nazi war criminals, the imprisonment of seven others, and the acquittal of three. Herman Goering, second-in-command to Hitler, committed suicide with a cyanide capsule before he could be hanged.

New York suburban post-was Gothic. A good Catholic boy wearing his first Holy Communion suit standing between his Jewish grandmother and his Italian grandfather. They loved coming to visit us on Long Island, which Grandma Sadie called "the country." Grandpa Pete planted a fig tree near the spot where we're standing and taught me to cherish all things Italian. His American citizenship papers from 1920 records his complexion as "dark."

These were powerful events for a young reader, one already familiar with expressions of anti-Semitism, to grasp. But nothing I had read to that point prepared me for the summation made by the British prosecutor, Hartley Shawcross. He began by reading an eyewitness account of a mass execution of Jews by the SS: "Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells, and waited for a sign from another SS man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand... An old woman with snow-white hair was holding the 1-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight.... The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head, and seemed to explain something to him."

According to the eyewitness, a Nazi guard counted off 20 people and directed them to a place behind a mound of earth. There was a tremendous grave. "People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people shot were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full." The witness estimated that it already contained about 1,000 people.

The SS man who did the shooting sat at the side of the pit, smoking a cigarette and holding a machine gun.

The next group of victims, naked, climbed down into the pit, over the bodies of the dead and dying. "Some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or the heads lying motionless on top of the bodies which lay before them. Blood was running away from their necks."

The Nazis at Nuremberg squirmed in their seats and grumbled as Hartley Shawcross concluded his summation: "Mankind itself -- struggling now to reestablish in all the countries of the world the common simple things -- liberty, love, understanding -- comes to this court and cries 'These are our laws, let them prevail!' . . . You will remember when you come to give your decision the story of the mass execution, but not in vengeance -- in a determination that these things shall not occur again. The father -- you remember -- pointed to the sky, and seemed to say something to his boy."

Until the moment I read that passage, sheltered and naive, I saw evil as theoretical. A good student, I could recite the formulas of my Catholic catechism. Sin separated you from God and from other human beings. It could be divided into academic categories. There was venial sin and mortal sin. Original sin and actual sin.

Now, in the stories of the Holocaust, I discovered that evil was real, and subject to judgment.

For the good, there was heaven -- that is what the father was explaining to his son, why he was pointing to the sky.

And for their executioners, there was -- I offered my most fervent adolescent prayers -- a place of eternal punishment.