HOW TERRIBLE IS IVAN?
Vanity Fair, June 1992
John Demjanjuk awaits appeal on the death sentence delivered against him as the notorious Ivan the Terrible—the mass murderer of Treblinka—in an extraordinarily emotional but deeply flawed war-crimes trial in Israel, the first since Adolf Eichmann’s in 1961. Now, as FREDRIC DANNEN reports, evidence unearthed by Demjanjuk’s family suggests the courts have the wrong man—evidence the U.S. government allegedly had access to all along
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JUDGE ZVI TAL of the Jerusalem District Court spoke without expression, but his words were venomous. After a yearlong trial, there could be no doubt, he said, that the defendant, John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland autoworker, was the Nazi war criminal known as “Ivan the Terrible.” The court did not believe Demjanjuk’s protestations of mistaken identity. He was the sadistic motorman who had operated the gas chambers at the Nazi death camp in Treblinka, Poland, between 1942 and 1943. The only suitable punishment for such a monster, an “arch-henchman” who “with his very own hands” had “humiliated, degraded, victimized,” and murdered tens of thousands of Jews, was death by hanging.
Seated in a wooden box, with headphones clamped to his ears translating the court’s Hebrew into his native Ukrainian, Demjanjuk quietly shook his head but otherwise showed no emotion as his death sentence was proclaimed. The reaction of the spectators in the courtroom, a theater converted for what had been billed as the Nazi trial of the decade, was different. Hundreds rose to their feet to applaud, to embrace, to chant “Death! Death!,” to shout insults at Demjanjuk’s Israeli lawyer. Some were weeping. A group of teenagers, led by an elderly Holocaust survivor from Florida, launched into a chorus of “Am Yisrael Hai”—“The People of Israel Live.”
In the mélée, one spectator thought it might be prudent to leave the courtroom as quickly as possible: the defendant’s son. John Demjanjuk Jr. was partway out the door when an Israeli of roughly the same age—twenty-two—jabbed a finger at him and offered some words of advice:
“You should kill your father!”
Recalling the scene today, four years later, John junior is still struck by the vehemence of that remark, coming from someone born, like himself, two decades after the end of World War II. But then, the testimony heard in that Jerusalem courtroom had vividly brought back to life the horrors of Treblinka and the unthinkable sadism of the man called Ivan the Terrible—“a creature,” said one survivor, “not from this planet.” Eyewitnesses told how Ivan tormented naked prisoners on their way to the gas chambers by hacking off pieces of their flesh with his sword—ears, noses, women’s breasts. How he routinely bashed skulls with an iron pipe. How he drove a wood drill into a man’s buttocks and threatened to shoot the victim if he made a sound. And how, with demonic relish, he ran the engine that pumped carbon monoxide into Treblinka’s gas chambers, which, in one year, killed more than 850,000 men, women, and children.
One by one, five Treblinka survivors identified Ivan Demjanjuk—he had Anglicized his first name on becoming an American citizen in 1958—as the man of their nightmares. They hadn’t known the Ukrainian motorman’s last name but said they could never forget his features. One survivor stood face-to-face with Demjanjuk and saw the “murderous eyes” of his tormentor. When Demjanjuk (pronounced Dem-YAHN-yook) took the stand to present his alibi—that he had been a Red Army P.O.W. during the war—he was vague, inconsistent, and entirely unconvincing.
You should kill your father! Since 1976, when John junior was an eleven-year-old altar boy, people had been telling him that his father was one of the greatest mass murderers in history. Today a tall, polite man with a pencil mustache, John says he never once believed his father was capable of Ivan the Terrible’s bloodlust. Far from feeling ashamed, he had dropped out of college to work full-time on Demjanjuk’s defense. And with the conviction and death sentence on appeal before Israel’s Supreme Court—the final arbiter—he knew there was one hope remaining to save his father from the gallows. Demjanjuk needed a better alibi, one that was absolutely airtight.
And that, John junior figured, meant only one thing. He had to find the real Ivan the Terrible.
Now, four years after the reading of the death sentence, with Demjanjuk still awaiting execution, John junior, along with his brother-in-law Edward Nishnic, has apparently accomplished his mission. Thanks to dogged detective work, incredible luck, and the effects of glasnost in the Soviet Union, the two men—“a couple of cement-heads from Cleveland,” in Nishnic’s words—have dislodged a cache of confessions taken by the K.G.B. from Soviets who were posted at Treblinka. The statements—sixty-one to date—all identify the Ivan the Terrible of the gas chambers as a man named Ivan Marchenko.
Born in 1911, Marchenko, if he is alive today, is eighty-one. Ed Nishnic couldn’t locate him, but he did find Marchenko’s daughters in the Ukraine a few months ago and obtained his wedding picture. The resemblance to Demjanjuk is unmistakable. The same Israeli newspapers that once blindly supported the government’s case have since published the wedding photo and quoted from the Soviet statements.
The new evidence amounts to nothing less than a political fiasco for the Jewish state. For a year the Demjanjuk trial had been televised and broadcast live on the radio as a means of educating a new generation about the Holocaust. It was also clearly designed to canonize the Treblinka survivors who took the stand, even though precedent had shown that superannuated eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. It now appears that this emphasis on the survivors is where the case went so tragically wrong: the court was all along forced to reconcile their testimony with one key piece of physical evidence—an SS photo identification card—that put Demjanjuk in outposts other than Treblinka. The court performed this feat by concluding that Demjanjuk had been shuttled back and forth, but it seems there was a better explanation: the survivors were mistaken.
Demjanjuk, who turned seventy-two in April, has spent six years in solitary confinement in Israel, after a year’s incarceration in the United States. His fate is now in the hands of five Israeli Supreme Court justices. Their decision may come at any time, though it could also take months. The judges have given the chief prosecutor until now to produce additional documents, which, he has promised, will vindicate the original verdict and the survivor witnesses.
Hardly anyone now believes Demjanjuk will hang, yet it is far from certain that he will be set free. There is still the troubling matter of the photo ID card, which, if upheld as authentic by the Supreme Court, puts Demjanjuk in the SS in some capacity, possibly as a common guard—the kind that Israel has never shown the least interest in prosecuting. Unfortunately for Demjanjuk, he is now caught up in the system, and, doubly unfortunate, under a quirk of Israeli law, a person can be convicted of charges not specified in his indictment. Therefore, it is possible that the Supreme Court will find Demjanjuk guilty of being, as journalist Gitta Sereny puts it, “Ivan the Less Terrible.”
John junior is nonetheless optimistic. In general, he thinks Israel has treated his father more fairly than did the U.S. Justice Department, which built the initial case against Demjanjuk, leading him to be stripped of his citizenship and extradited. In the course of their detective work, John and his brother-in-law obtained Justice Department documents—some of them retrieved from dumpsters—that are, in their own way, as disturbing as the long-hidden Soviet protocols. One set of documents indicates that, in their zeal to prove that Demjanjuk was Ivan of Treblinka, U.S. government lawyers used false testimony from an ex-Nazi witness. And as far back as 1978, the Justice Department was aware of a gas-chamber operator at Treblinka named Marchenko who fit the profile of Ivan the Terrible, yet amazingly chose not to pursue this lead.
Although the documents fall short of proving a “frameup,” as Demjanjuk’s family claims, they make a strong case for prosecutorial misconduct. They also show that the U.S. government handed the state of Israel a case that was oversold from the beginning.
THIS IS COMMAND CENTRAL,” Ed Nishnic says, leading a visitor down into the basement of the Demjanjuk house in Seven Hills, a suburb of Cleveland. It was here, amid groaning file cabinets, a word processor, and a fax machine, that Nishnic and his brother-in-law conducted their hunt for Ivan the Terrible.
John junior grew up in this red brick ranch house, small enough to be heated by a wood-burning stove. Vera Demjanjuk, the wife of the accused, a petite gray-haired woman who speaks with a thick Ukrainian accent, moves nervously about the house, cleaning. Vera will not speak to the press. Nor will her two older children—Lydia, whose first marriage ended in divorce in the thick of Demjanjuk’s denaturalization trial, and Irene, who is married to Ed Nishnic and is the mother of Demjanjuk’s two grandchildren. “My wife has just become destroyed over this thing,” Nishnic says. “A wreck.”
By contrast, Nishnic, tall and Slavic, with a neatly trimmed black beard, and John junior are ebullient. For them, the case is both an obsession and a labor of love. A former employment agent, Nishnic has worked on nothing but Demjanjuk’s defense since he and Irene were married in 1983. John junior completed two years toward a finance degree at Cleveland State before turning to the case full-time, and in 1990 he married an insurance executive. Both men are supported by their wives, and by donations from the Ukrainian community, though these have largely dried up. John says the defense fund is more than $160,000 in debt. The office phone has been cut off six times in eight months. Both men agree their financial problems would be over if they allowed Holocaust deniers and other hate groups—whom they refer to loathingly as “the lunatic fringe” and “shithead revisionists”—to use the Demjanjuk case as a forum for their views.
As much as the two men love to talk about the case, it is difficult to get them to say much about Demjanjuk himself. Apparently, there isn’t much to say; his own lawyer calls him “a limited person.” (Demjanjuk repeatedly frustrated his prosecutors by giving away nothing besides a vacant stare or a foolish grin in court; one complained bitterly that his “Nazi mind” refused “to reveal itself.”) Unable to speak good English despite thirty-four years in America, Demjanjuk comes off as rather an oaf—big, bulky, and bald-headed, with wrists so thick he requires a special set of manacles. As he stepped off the plane in Israel, he astounded police by asking if he could kiss the ground of the Holy Land. On his first day in the Jerusalem court, he bellowed out “Boker tov!”—Hebrew for “Good morning”—and waved cheerfully to the spectators. When one witness made a crack about his bald pate, he literally doubled over with laughter, his entire head turning red.
“My father,” says John junior, “is just your typical immigrant who came over on the boat trying to escape Communism and make a better life. Go into any Serbian or Ukrainian church and you’ll meet a hundred like him.”
In his windowless cell at Ayalon Prison, near Tel Aviv, Demjanjuk is denied access to the press—and any other visitors, apart from his lawyer and immediate family. Thus, the best available narrative of his life comes from his testimony in the Jerusalem court.
Ivan Demjanjuk was born on April 3, 1920, in the village of Dub Macharenzi. Both parents were disabled—his father, Nikolai, lost several fingers in World War I, and his mother, Olga, had caught a severe cold while pregnant with Ivan and could no longer bend her right leg. Ivan attended the village school for nine years, but completed only four grades because he missed too many classes. The reason for his absences, he said, was his family’s poverty—whenever his father found work, he wore the one pair of shoes.
In 1932 and 1933, Ivan suffered through Stalin’s man-made famine, which left between 7 and 10 million Ukrainians dead of starvation. “People were lying dead in their homes, in the yards, on the roads, exposed to sunlight,” Demjanjuk said. “Nobody collected them.” In desperation, Nikolai sold his house for the equivalent of eight loaves of bread and moved the family to a collective farm near Moscow. But there was no work; the Demjanjuks soon returned to their village.
Ivan eventually got a job as a tractor driver, which made him prime Red Army material. In 1938 he had joined the Komsomol—the Communist youth organization—but only, he said, because of peer pressure. Two years later he got his draft notice, which advised that persons to be inducted “had to have two pairs of underpants, a spoon, and a plate. ”I was very poor…and I came to the recruitment office without any underwear.” He was sent home, but was called a second time, in 1941, and inducted, still without undergarments.
After artillery training Demjanjuk was sent to the front. On the banks of the river Prut the Soviet army fell under heavy German fire and retreated. Near the Dnieper River, he was hit by shrapnel from an artillery shell, which had to be removed from his back; he still bears a scar. By early 1942 he was back fighting at Kerch, on the Crimean peninsula, and it was there, during a heavy rain, that Demjanjuk and his unit were taken prisoner by the Germans.
From this point until Germany surrendered to the Allies in May 1945 there are two distinct versions of Demjanjuk’s life—the one told by Demjanjuk and the one told by the Israeli district court. Neither may be the truth.
The Demjanjuk version runs as follows: After being captured in the Crimea, he was taken to the German prisoner-of-war camp in Rovno, then in Poland. A few weeks later he was transferred to the P.O.W. camp in Chelm, Poland, where he remained for eighteen months, until the spring of 1944. Conditions at Chelm were subhuman—Ukrainian prisoners died by the tens of thousands of starvation, cholera, and dysentery. The Germans put Demjanjuk to work digging peat. After Chelm, he was taken to yet another camp, in Graz, Austria, where he was given a tattoo to indicate his blood type; after the war he had the tattoo removed, leaving scar tissue on his left arm. In February 1945 he was allowed to join the Russian Liberation Army, an anti-Stalinist militia funded and armed by the Germans.
In the court’s version Demjanjuk did go to Rovno in May 1942, but within two months, like hundreds of other Ukrainian P.O.W.’s, decided to improve his lot by volunteering to work for the Nazis. He was taken to Trawniki, the Nazi training camp for Soviet defectors, near the Polish city of Lublin. There he was issued a uniform, a rifle, and a photo ID card, and taught how to be a Wachmann, or guard, at other Polish camps, where Jews were to be imprisoned and slaughtered. The insignia he later removed was tattooed by the SS. Between September 1942 and August 1943, Demjanjuk served at Treblinka as Ivan the Terrible, operator of the gas chamber’s engine.
The prosecution had physical evidence that, if authentic, supported part of its version and demolished Demjanjuk’s alibi: the Trawniki card. First shown to the U.S. Justice Department in the early eighties by the Soviet Embassy, the card bears a photo that appears to be of Demjanjuk. It also describes correctly his date of birth, father’s name, hair color—dark blond—and the scar on his back. There are, however, some problems with the card. Staple holes in the photo indicate that it was removed from some other document. Demjanjuk’s height is given as five feet nine when in fact he is closer to six feet. Defense lawyers—and Demjanjuk himself—pounced on these flaws to argue that the card was a K.G.B. forgery designed to discredit the Ukrainian-American community. In the end, fifty days of the trial were spent evaluating the card, down to the rust stain left by a paper clip.
But even if the card was genuine, there was another problem that outweighed all the others—it did not mention Treblinka. On the contrary, the card indicates that on September 22, 1942, Demjanjuk was posted to L.G. Okzow, a work farm near Chelm, and that on March 27, 1943, he was sent to Sobibor, a Polish death camp similar to Treblinka. There isn’t a hint of what his specific chores would have been at those places.
Demjanjuk and the Israeli version are in agreement about the details of his life after V‑E Day. In 1945 he ended up at a displaced persons’ camp in Landshut, Germany, and it was there that he met Vera Kowlowa, whom he later married. Over the next few years, they moved through several more D.P. camps in Germany, including one in Ulm, where Lydia was born in 1950. A year later, Demjanjuk applied for immigration to the United States. On his application form, he gave his nationality as Polish. (Demjanjuk lied, he later explained, because he was terrified of being sent back to the Soviet Union after having served in the Russian Liberation Army.) In February 1952, the application having been granted, Ivan, Vera, and Lydia boarded a troopship and arrived in New York harbor.
Their next stop was Decatur, Indiana, where the Demjanjuks lived and worked on a farm. Then new friends lured them to Cleveland, where the Ford Motor Company was expanding its plant. In August 1952, Ford hired Demjanjuk, for $1.80 an hour, as a mechanic in the engine hot-test department. Before long, he was promoted to motor balancer and joined the U.A.W. local. In the meantime, Vera found work in the coiling department at General Electric. Both of them would remain with their respective employers until retirement. Initially they lived in the Cleveland suburb of Parma, where Irene and John junior were born, but in 1973 they moved to Seven Hills. Every Sunday the family attended services at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Church. Demjanjuk spent his free time tending his garden and playing with the children. “We were,” John junior says, “the perfect family.”
THE AMERICAN DREAM began to unravel for Demjanjuk soon after the move to Seven Hills. In the mid-seventies, a pro-Soviet journalist in New York returned from a visit to the Ukraine with a list of more than seventy alleged Nazi collaborators living in the United States. Included on that list was Ivan Demjanjuk, who was accused of having served as a Wachmann at the death camp in Sobibor, Poland, and at the concentration camp in Flossenburg, Germany. There was no mention of Treblinka with regard to Demjanjuk, although a Miami man on the list, Fedor Fedorenko, was alleged to have been posted there.
The list soon found its way to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The I.N.S. sent Demjanjuk’s 1951 immigration photo to the Israeli police, along with the Sobibor allegation. Demjanjuk was thirty-one in the picture—exactly the same age that Ivan Marchenko would have been in 1942 at Treblinka. The Israeli authorities were also given a head shot of Fedor Fedorenko, and photos of fifteen other suspected Nazis in America.
It was then, in early 1976, that the case against Demjanjuk appears to have taken its first, and fateful, wrong turn, as Israeli police committed two serious procedural errors. First, they pasted the seventeen I.N.S. photos onto three pieces of cardboard, to be shown to potential witnesses; on the third piece, beneath six small, blurry photographs, were large and sharp snapshots of Demjanjuk and Fedorenko. In police parlance, the photo spread was “suggestive”—the eye immediately went to the better-quality pictures.
The second mistake was even worse. Under accepted police procedure, no names of suspects are given in advance. Yet the Israeli police placed the following ad in the newspaper: “The Nazi Crime Investigation Division is conducting an investigation against the Ukrainians Ivan Demjanjuk and Fedor Fedorenko. Survivors of the Death Camps at Sobibor and Treblinka are requested to report to the Israel Police Headquarters.”
Thus, the Treblinka survivors who answered the ad may have shown up at headquarters thinking they were meant to identify the Ukrainian named Ivan. As it happened, no Sobibor survivor recognized Demjanjuk from the photo spread, but, sure enough, Israelis who had escaped from Treblinka zeroed in on his picture. Among these were four men who, a decade later, would stand as witnesses at the Demjanjuk trial in Jerusalem: Eliyahu Rosenberg, Josef Czarny, Gustav Boraks, and Pinchas Epstein. As they settled on Demjanjuk’s photo, their statements were duly recorded:
Rosenberg: “That man looks very similar to the Ukrainian Ivan…whom they call Ivan Grozny [Ivan the Terrible].”
Czarny: “Dos iz Ivan! Ivan Grozny von Treblinka! My God! He lives!”
Boraks: “This is the photo of Ivan Grozny. I recognize him with one hundred percent certainty.”
Epstein: “This photo reminds me very strongly of Ivan.”
Interestingly, Rosenberg and Epstein, who had the most day-to-day contact with Ivan the Terrible, were the least emphatic in their initial identification. Epstein, Czarny, and other Treblinka survivors also picked out Fedorenko from the photo spread.
The Israeli authorities turned their information back over to the I.N.S., noting that the agency must have been mistaken about Demjanjuk—he had apparently been at Treblinka, not Sobibor. It was now up to the I.N.S. to take action.
The United States has never been equipped to conduct Nazi war-crimes trials; the most an American court could do to Fedorenko or Demjanjuk was revoke his citizenship and order him deported or extradited. The first to be prosecuted was Fedorenko. The case looked like a sure winner—in a pre-trial deposition, Fedorenko admitted he had been a Wachmann at Treblinka, but said he was merely a perimeter guard who had been “forced” to serve the Germans. At his denaturalization trial, which opened in May 1978 in Fort Lauderdale, survivors of Treblinka such as Epstein and Czarny testified against Fedorenko. Yet, to everyone’s amazement, Judge Norman Roettger acquitted Fedorenko on all counts. He ruled that the Israeli survivors were “coached” and “not credible.” Moreover, he accepted Fedorenko’s defense, calling him a “prisoner-guard.” (This oxymoron is highly offensive to death-camp survivors, who tend to recall all Ukrainian guards as enthusiastic participants.)
The Justice Department was stunned by Roettger’s decision and considered appealing the case. In September 1978, an assistant to the solicitor general named Allan Ryan Jr. wrote a fifteen-page memo discouraging an appeal. On reflection, however, Ryan not only changed his mind but successfully argued the appeal before the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. The court ruled that Fedorenko’s role as a death-camp guard—whether or not he had committed atrocities—was enough to have him denaturalized. Fedorenko was returned to the place of his birth, the Soviet Union, where he was executed by firing squad for being a Nazi collaborator.
In the summer of 1979, as the Fedorenko case was being played out, the Justice Department launched its own Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations. A few months later, Allan Ryan was recruited as O.S.I. director. By this time, John Demjanjuk already knew he was in trouble. In 1976, soon after the Israeli survivors fingered his photograph, he had been summoned to the Cleveland U.S. Attorney’s Office for a deposition which, on advice of counsel, he had declined to give. A federal complaint was filed a year later, and his first deposition was taken in 1978. When Demjanjuk’s denaturalization trial finally began in February 1981, the O.S.I. and the Cleveland U.S. Attorney’s Office prosecuted him jointly. Treblinka survivors were again called upon, including a few who had testified against Fedorenko—and been traumatized by not being believed. This time they had nothing to fear. In June 1981, Cleveland judge Frank Battisti handed down his forty-four-page verdict, which concluded that “defendant was present at Treblinka in 1942–1943.” Demjanjuk was stripped of his citizenship.
In his decision, Judge Battisti singled out the videotaped testimony of Otto Horn. Horn was a retired German nurse and the only Treblinka SS man to be acquitted of crimes against humanity at the 1959–64 trials in Dusseldorf. (The acquittal remains controversial: a report by the Polish Commission Investigating Nazi Crimes cites Horn for “special cruelty” at the camp.) Horn had known Ivan the Terrible well; they had worked together closely for a year. On November 14, 1979, O.S.I. attorney Norman Moscowitz interviewed Horn at his home in West Berlin. Moscowitz brought with him two sets of eight photographs, with a picture of Demjanjuk in each set. Three months later, on videotape, Moscowitz asked Horn to recount what had happened at their meeting.
Moscowitz: Would you describe, in your own words, how these photos were shown to you?…
Horn: First I was shown these larger pictures.…
Moscowitz: Did you in fact identify or recognize someone in those photographs?
Horn: Yes. This Ivan.
Moscowitz: Were you shown another set of photographs aside from these which we’ve just discussed?
Horn: Yes.
Moscowitz: When you looked at those photographs—this other set—where was this first set of photographs?
Horn: They had been removed again.
In short, a positive identification from a crucial witness, which placed Demjanjuk at Treblinka. There was just one problem. Horn’s testimony was false.
John junior and Ed Nishnic found this out some years later, under most unusual circumstances. In the late 1980s, the O.S.I.’s janitor was in the habit of disposing of the agency’s garbage in a dumpster at a McDonald’s restaurant on K Street in Washington, D.C. Unbeknownst to the O.S.I., a Demjanjuk sympathizer was lifting the plastic garbage bags and turning them over to the family. Donning gloves and coveralls, John junior and Nishnic spent countless hours sifting through the refuse, sometimes having to tape together pieces of documents that had been ripped up.
In one bag they found, fully intact, the original set of reports prepared by O.S.I. investigator Bernard Dougherty Jr. and historian George Garand, both of whom had accompanied Norman Moscowitz to Berlin for the Otto Horn interview. Their reports, written a few days after that meeting, describe in mutually consistent detail what actually occurred.
When Horn was shown the first set of eight photographs, he “studied each of [them] at length but was unable to positively identify any of the pictures, although he believed he recognized one of them (not DEMJANJUK).… The first series of photographs was then gathered and placed in a stack, off to the side of the table—with that of DEMJANJUK lying face up on top of the pile, facing HORN [emphasis added].” Next, Horn saw a picture of Demjanjuk in the second stack and made the unsurprising observation that it was the “same person” as the man in the photo lying suggestively on top of the first stack. At long last, he identified Demjanjuk as Ivan of Treblinka.
To compound the injury, when Nishnic and John junior let it be known that they had found this incriminating garbage, the Justice Department launched an F.B.I. probe accusing them of theft of government documents. The matter was settled last July, when the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that the O.S.I. documents had been “lawfully recovered” from the dumpster on K Street. At the same time, the O.P.R. found no wrongdoing on the O.S.I.’s part—the documents had simply been “negligently discarded.”
THE STATE OF ISRAEL has long been frustrating to Nazi-hunters. Although it passed the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Law in 1950, two years after Israel was founded, the statute has been little used. During the fifties a number of Kapos—Jews who had collaborated with the Nazis in the camps—were convicted, having foolishly settled in Israel. But until Demjanjuk was indicted in Israel in September 1986, only one non-Jew had been tried under the 1950 statute—Adolf Eichmann, chief engineer of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” who was convicted in 1961 and hanged. (Interestingly, the key legal issue with Eichmann was not identity but jurisdiction: he had been discovered in Argentina, and, rather than being extradited, was wrapped in a blanket by Israeli agents and kidnapped.)
Why was Israel so reluctant to conduct another war-crimes trial after Eichmann? “It’s a question I’ve asked myself time and again,” says Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem. “Perhaps it’s because the whole subject raises all sorts of painful issues—like why did six million Jews go like sheep to the slaughter?”
Zuroff did not fully appreciate Israel’s ambivalence toward conducting Nazi trials until April 1983. Allan Ryan had recently left the O.S.I., and his successor, Neal Sher, arrived in Israel that month to discuss a denaturalized American named Valerian Trifa. He had been a leader of Romania’s Iron Guard, and in that role had incited crowds to murderous pogroms of Jews in Bucharest. Sher asked if Israel would like to extradite Trifa. He received a prompt answer: no.
The conversation between the O.S.I. and Israel’s Justice Ministry was held in secret, but Zuroff learned about it and leaked the story to the media. There was a furor, but the ministry defended its decision. Israel would not shrink from prosecuting Nazis, but a defendant had to meet three important criteria. First, he must have committed murder with his own hands. Second, he must be relatively young and in good health. And, third, there must be Jewish eyewitnesses to his crimes who were not living, inaccessibly, behind the Iron Curtain—and preferably they would be in Israel.
On October 18, 1983, the Israeli police issued a warrant for the arrest of a man who appeared to fit all the requirements—John Demjanjuk, also known as Ivan the Terrible. The request for extradition came a month later.
It had never occurred to Demjanjuk or his family that he might wind up in Israel. His great fear was that he would be deported to the Soviet Union and end up like Fedor Fedorenko—executed by firing squad. Ironically, Israel’s decision to extradite Demjanjuk may have saved his life.
Demjanjuk was finally flown to Israel on February 28, 1986, after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal. He was held in Ayalon Prison awaiting trial for almost exactly one year, as a crack team of Israeli prosecutors prepared the case against him. The team was officially headed up by Yonah Blatman, who held a post akin to U.S. solicitor general, but the greatest share of the work fell to Michael “Mickey” Shaked of the Jerusalem D.A.’s office. Demjanjuk, for his part, was represented by Mark O’Connor, of Buffalo, New York, who would prove supremely inept. O’Connor in turn hired a Cleveland criminal lawyer, John Gill, and local Israeli counsel, Yoram Sheftel. With a legal system based on British colonial law, Israel has no jury trials—all cases are decided by judges. A panel of three judges was selected for the Demjanjuk case: Dov Levin, Zvi Tal, and Dalia Dorner.
There is no question that the trial was intended to be an educational tool. Though the defense never disputed the existence of Treblinka, or even of Ivan the Terrible, the first witness called by the prosecution was Dr. Yitzhak Arad, a Holocaust historian whose vivid description of the death camp and its origins set the tone for the rest of the trial. Arad began at the beginning, with the rise of the Nazi Party to power in 1933 and the adoption of the official policy of persecution of Jews, carried out in gradual stages—isolation, dispossession, annihilation. Soon after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, the SS was ordered to concentrate the Jews into large ghettos near railway lines. In January 1942, senior representatives of the Third Reich met at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin and laid out the practical steps to implement “the Final Solution.” In accordance with the plan, three death camps were built in eastern Poland between February and July 1942: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. These were quite unlike the concentration camps of Germany. They had few barracks because they were designed solely for extermination—the convoys of Jews who arrived would be dead within hours. Treblinka was the most horribly efficient of the three camps; in one year it would become a mass grave for more than 850,000 people.
Jews reached Treblinka after a one- to three-day train journey, crammed one hundred to a car, without food or water. On arrival, men and women were separated and ordered to undress in the lower camp, known as Camp One. The women’s heads were shorn—their hair had industrial value to Nazi Germany. Then the naked prisoners were driven, to the crack of whips, along a narrow path connecting Camp One and Camp Two. The SS called this path the Himmelstrasse, or Road to Heaven. Once in Camp Two, the prisoners were forced, hundreds at a time, into the gas chambers. With the tightfitting doors bolted behind them, they were asphyxiated by the carbon monoxide fumes of the engine. Within a half-hour their bodies were untangled and removed, tossed into a burial pit, and covered with chloride. (Later, at Heinrich Himmler’s orders, the corpses were burned instead.)
The only Jews not killed immediately were those selected on arrival to perform jobs, such as sorting clothing and possessions into neat piles. Jewish “barbers” shaved the women’s hair, while “dentists” were ordered to pry gold teeth from the mouths of the dead. Other Jews were recruited as corpse carriers. During Treblinka’s one year of operation, there were on average several hundred “work Jews” each day; many were killed and replaced, or committed suicide by hanging themselves with their belts. By the summer of 1943, the work Jews noticed that the gassings were slowing down, realized that Treblinka’s mission was nearing completion, and surmised, correctly, that the SS planned to murder them as well. They revolted on August 2; several hundred escaped into the forest, but many of them were rounded up and shot. Only a few dozen managed to survive until after the war.
To help the thirty German SS men at Treblinka keep order, the Nazis employed about a hundred armed auxiliaries, mostly Red Army soldiers taken from P.O.W. camps and trained at Trawniki. Some of the Soviets worked as guards, but others were more directly involved in the killing. Among the latter were two men who helped operate the gas chambers in Camp Two—Ivan and Nikolai.
One of the work Jews who escaped in the August 2 revolt was Pinchas Epstein, who for eleven months had carried corpses in Camp Two. Only seventeen at the time, and a still-vigorous sixty-two at the Demjanjuk trial, he was the first to take the stand to impart his recollections of Ivan the Terrible. Epstein told how, on one occasion, twenty inmates suspected of plotting to escape were rounded up; Ivan tortured them by breaking their arms, hands, and legs with an iron pipe. Then they were all hanged.
Epstein next recounted an incident about which, he said, “I have nightmares…to this very day.” He continued: “One day a living little girl managed to get out of the gas chambers. She was alive. She was speaking. A girl of about twelve or fourteen. People who took the corpses out of the gas chambers made her sit down on the side, and this little girl, her words ring in my ears still. She said, ‘I want my mother.’… Ivan took one young man from among us, whose name was Jubas. He struck him brutally with his whip, he lashed at him…and he ordered him, ‘Take off your pants, and…’”—Epstein hesitated—“‘and come fuck.’… And Jubas mounted this child, and this act, as I understand it, was not performed.” The girl was shot instead.
At the end of his direct examination, Epstein identified John Demjanjuk, sitting in his wooden box behind the defense table, as the monster he had been describing. How could he be sure, Prosecutor Shaked asked him.
“I see Ivan every night. My poor wife, I dream about Ivan every night. I envision him every night, he is imprinted in my memory.” Moments later, Epstein was glaring at Demjanjuk and pounding the witness stand in anger: “There he is! There he is! There he is!”
Four other Treblinka survivors took the stand to identify Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. One of them, Yehiel Reichman, had worked as a “dentist” in Camp Two. Two others—Gustav Boraks and Josef Czarny—worked in Camp One and had far less exposure to Ivan than Epstein did. In addition, Boraks had grown a bit senile in the decade since he first selected Demjanjuk’s picture from the Israeli-police photo spread. Nevertheless, all three made effective witnesses.
Eliyahu Rosenberg was probably the most important prosecution witness at the trial. His testimony ran three days and filled more than five hundred pages of transcript. Like Epstein, he had worked at Camp Two as a corpse carrier. Later, he became a Bademeister, one of the “shower cleaners” who washed blood from the gas chambers. He also had escaped in the August 2 revolt. One could see in Rosenberg, barely five feet tall yet a commanding presence, a man with the strength and cunning to survive.
Rosenberg testified that he had known Ivan well. One time, Ivan ordered him to copulate with a corpse—he was spared this ordeal by an SS officer—and, another time, Ivan took part in whipping him for stealing some bread. “I would see him holding a sort of sword in his hand,” he added, “and sometimes he would cut off a piece of nose, a piece of ear, stab, you just cannot comprehend why, why.” Religious Jews, with beards and sidelocks, seemed particularly to provoke him. Ivan dispatched one such elderly man by placing his head between strands of barbed wire and beating him until he was strangled.
The most dramatic moment, perhaps, of the entire trial occurred when Rosenberg was asked for an in-court identification of the accused. He requested that Demjanjuk remove his glasses. Demjanjuk did so, then stood up and made his own request: would Rosenberg stand face-to-face with him and get a really close look? The courtroom fell silent as Rosenberg strode over to Demjanjuk’s wooden box. Suddenly, Demjanjuk said, “Shalom!”—hello in Hebrew—and with an idiotic grin thrust out his hand. Rosenberg recoiled in horror, screaming in Yiddish, “Murderer! Bandit!” In the third row, Rosenberg’s wife fainted.
Rosenberg returned to the witness stand, trembling. “Ivan,” he declared. “I say so unhesitatingly and without the slightest doubt. This is Ivan from the gas chambers. The man I am now looking at. I saw his eyes. I saw those murderous eyes. I saw that face of his. How dare you put out your hand to me, murderer that you are?”
There was one problem with Rosenberg’s testimony: in two separate statements, in 1945 and 1947, he had described how Ivan the Terrible had been killed in the August 2 revolt. But Rosenberg explained that he had not actually seen this occur, only heard about it, and attributed his prior testimony to wishful thinking. Yitzhak Arad, the Holocaust historian, endorsed this explanation, and in its verdict the district court accepted it fully.
Yoram Sheftel, Demjanjuk’s Israeli lawyer, wanted to ask Dr. Arad if the survivors’ identification of the accused might, too, be wishful thinking. But Judge Levin disallowed the inquiry.
“That is a question,” Levin said, “for a psychologist, not a historian.”
THE TREBLINKA SURVIVORS made such powerful witnesses that a savvy defense attorney might not have cross-examined them at all, choosing instead to challenge their testimony by putting memory experts on the stand. But Mark O’Connor, Demjanjuk’s lead counsel, was far from savvy. He spent hours interrogating each one, making them only more sympathetic. He even asked Epstein to point out, on a scale model of Treblinka, the spot where his brother was killed.
Worse, O’Connor raised the ultimate taboo subject—the line between victim and participant. The overwhelming guilt felt by death-camp survivors is a well-recognized phenomenon. “It’s a tragic thing,” notes Israeli columnist Tom Segev, “but to stay alive they were forced to take part in the process of extermination.” Rosenberg, for example, was required to put sand under the doors of the gas chambers to keep the deadly carbon monoxide from escaping. And it was Rosenberg who bore the brunt of O’Connor’s crude line of inquiry.
First, O’Connor led Rosenberg through an account of how a group of naked prisoners had tried to escape through a fence. They were immediately caught and subjected to a special torture, placed in a gas chamber filled with chlorine. The next morning, when Rosenberg helped remove their red and bloated bodies, the skin came off in his hands.
Then O’Connor sprang his question: “Mr. Rosenberg, was it ever in your heart at the time you were watching this happen to try and do something to help those men that were running outside naked?”
Rosenberg looked stricken. He could not seem to believe his ears. “In what manner could I help these people?” he said at last. “How? With what? With what? With screaming? Should I have screamed at them: ‘Don’t get into those gas chambers!’? They didn’t wan to get into the gas chambers! And if, God forbid, any of us would have screamed…I don’t wish you, Mr. O’Connor, to even look at what would have happened to such a person. They would have shoved me straight alive into a pit full of blood. So don’t ask me questions of that manner, Mr. O’Connor, I implore you. You weren’t there. I was there.” In a crescendo of agitation, Rosenberg pointed to Demjanjuk: “Ask him! Ask him Let him tell you! Let him tell you what he would have done to me!.… I was never asked such a painful question in my life!”
The Demjanjuks had hired Mark O’Connor back in 1983 at the recommendation of his father, Edward, a defense witness at the denaturalization trial. A former Vietnam captain, Mark was dashing, with blue eyes, a square Irish jaw, and bright-red hair—occasionally made brighter with dye. The family never checked his credentials; years later, Susan Adams of The American Lawyer retraced O’Connor’s steps in Buffalo and found that he had “little if any experience as a trial lawyer” before taking on Demjanjuk as a client. (O’Connor insists that he has litigated criminal and civil cases in Erie County, New York, for nearly twenty years, but in an interview was unable to name a single judge he had appeared before.)
O’Connor did not appear to want to share the defense spotlight, though he clearly needed to hire Israeli co-counsel, at the very least to instruct him on the nation’s law. Although he did consult briefly with one respected Israeli law professor, that alliance soon faltered, and O’Connor waited until one month before the official start of the trial to hire local counsel.
The attorney O’Connor chose, Yoram Sheftel, was, in his own words, “definitely the most hated criminal lawyer in prosecution circles in the country—and proud of it.” Short and slight, bearded, and utterly fearless, Sheftel, forty-three, is one of the few Israelis to drive a Porsche 924 Turbo, and probably one of the fewer still to wear love beads. Before taking the Demjanjuk case, his claim to fame was helping Meyer Lansky obtain a tourist visa.
“I admired Meyer Lansky all my life,” says Sheftel, who keeps three gilt-framed photos of himself with the gangster on his office wall. “He represented to me a different type of a Jew. A Jew who was not afraid of the goyim, who was tough and rough, totally different from the Jews in the Diaspora. The fact that he was accused of breaking the law even in the fiercest way possible in the U.S. didn’t interest me at all—it’s a goyish country.… The only people who would have been dead in Treblinka if every Jew was like Meyer Lansky would be the Ukrainians and Germans—there wouldn’t be any Treblinka.”
Sheftel and O’Connor quickly became enemies. “Within two months,” Sheftel says, “I realized that he’s a complete schmuck, and that he’s done nothing for five years, complete and total nothing. Didn’t have one witness, didn’t know properly even the alibi of Demjanjuk. His prime interest was to participate, on television, live, in the case of the century. The day before the case started, he asked me to prepare urgently a motion that a TV monitor be put on the defense table so he can see how he’s looking!”
Indeed, from his opening statement to the court, O’Connor appears to have mistaken himself for Maximilian Schell in Judgment at Nuremberg. “If this is only the second time in history, with regard to the State of Israel, the young State of Israel, that the sword of St. Michael has been taken out in the use of long-arm jurisdiction to bring back into the House of Zion an international criminal…what then does the world do with the precedent that’s been set down by this tribunal, by this legal Sanhedrin?” he asked.
O’Connor was somewhat less grandiloquent in addressing Sheftel, whom he more than once ordered, in full hearing of the court, to “sit down and don’t get up again.” On occasion, O’Connor would switch off Sheftel’s microphone in mid-sentence. Another time, he jabbed a pencil in Sheftel’s face and hissed, “Turkey, get in your Porsche and go back to Tel Aviv!”
By May 1987, as the prosecution was winding up its case, Ed Nishnic and John junior had concluded that Mark O’Connor had to be fired. There was one big obstacle: O’Connor had convinced Demjanjuk that he alone stood between his client and the gallows. Finally, in July, Vera was brought to Demjanjuk’s cell and persuaded him to go along with the family’s decision. A few days later it was made official. O’Connor was out.
In retrospect, John junior and Ed Nishnic say, the one benefit of Mark O’Connor was that his “substandard defense” forced them to learn the case. O’Connor, who was paid at least a half-million dollars for his efforts, scoffs at the criticisms raised by the Demjanjuk family and Sheftel, and echoed by John Gill, the Cleveland lawyer. “It’s sour grapes,” he said, “because they did such a tragic job.” He declares, “My defense speaks for itself.”
Gill assumed the role of lead counsel, and within a week called his first defense witness: John Demjanjuk. Asked by Gill whether he had ever killed a person in his life, Demjanjuk replied, “Never. I cannot even kill a chicken.” But in seven days on the stand, most of it in cross-examination, Demjanjuk found his alibi reviewed, dissected, and debated until there was little left of it.
In February 1988, a year after the trial had begun in earnest, the lawyers gave their summations. John junior had sat quietly throughout the trial, the only family member to attend every session. But in the middle of Mickey Shaked’s summation, the strain finally got the better of him. He jumped from his seat and stalked out the door, yelling to Shaked, “You’re a damn liar. You son of a bitch!” The outburst unhinged Vera Demjanjuk and Irene Nishnic, also in court that day; they, too, began to scream, and had to be escorted from the room. Throughout the entire spectacle, John Demjanjuk Sr. sat impassively, smiling.
The three judges deliberated for two months, and in April 1988 produced a guilty verdict that runs 768 pages in the English translation. The death sentence followed one week later.
UNDER ISRAELI LAW, any capital case is automatically reviewed by the Supreme Court. It is the only court of appeals in Israel above the district level, and also doubles as a court of equity. It consists of twelve justices, of whom one, three, or five are selected to hear a given case. It differs greatly from American appellate courts in readily accepting new evidence. Five judges were chosen to hear the Demjanjuk appeal, including the court’s president, Meir Shamgar. Leading the prosecution was Mickey Shaked. John Gill had quit the defense, leaving Yoram Sheftel alone and in charge. With no one around to switch off his microphone, Sheftel would prove a major irritant to the prosecutors and judges. “You are in a court and not in a theater,” Justice Menachem Elon snapped at one point.
Sheftel had not intended to argue the appeal alone. In mid-1988, he had recruited Dov Eitan, a highly respected former district-court judge, who had been forced to resign from the bench in 1983 after signing a petition calling for Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon. (Israeli judges are not supposed to meddle in politics.) On November 29, 1988, one week before the appeal was scheduled to begin, Eitan had breakfast with his wife, Miriam. “We made a date for eleven o’clock to go and buy a new suit for the appeal,” she recalls. “At eight he left to go to the office. At half past eight, he was dead.”
Eitan had taken the elevator to the fifteenth floor of a building one block from his office and jumped out the window—or so the police ruled following a brief investigation that did not include an autopsy. Miriam does not believe that her husband was pushed, but says he had been receiving death threats for agreeing to take the Demjanjuk case, and may have been coerced into jumping by a blackmailer threatening to expose what she will describe only as a “personal matter.” One of Eitan’s daughters, Ricky Zehavi, says her father never recovered from being forced to resign from the bench, and thinks this is a more probable suicide motive.
There was more high drama to come. At Eitan’s funeral, on December 1, Yisrael Yehezkeli, a seventy-year-old man who had lost much of his family at Treblinka, confronted Yoram Sheftel and threw acid in his face. Sheftel’s left eye was severely damaged, but he eventually regained most of his sight through corneal surgery. Yehezkeli, whom Sheftel calls “a victim of the press campaign against me,” got three years.
John junior says that the death of Dov Eitan, whom he and Nishnic considered “brilliant,” was his moment of greatest despair. And yet the suicide, along with the acid attack on Sheftel, may have inadvertently saved Demjanjuk from hanging. Because of those two incidents, the Supreme Court appeal was put off for a year and a half. And during that time Nishnic and John junior stepped up their search for Ivan the Terrible.
In September 1990, John junior traveled to Simferopol, on the Crimean peninsula, along with Yoram Sheftel and two Ukrainian supporters. It was in Simferopol that Fedor Fedorenko had been tried and executed for war crimes at Treblinka. Perhaps the trial records would contain testimony about Ivan the Terrible. Fedorenko’s lawyer hung up on them, but then John and his colleagues dropped in on the judge who had heard the case and sentenced Fedorenko to death. John, who speaks Ukrainian, explained why the records were so important to him. The judge was sympathetic. He said he would retrieve the file from the Simferopol K.G.B. and present it to them the next morning. “It seemed too incredible to be true,” John says.
It was. The next morning, the judge informed them that the K.G.B. would not release the Fedorenko file. But in November, after John and his search party had gone home in frustration, Alexander Yemetz, a sympathizer in the Ukrainian Parliament, was able to get the file transferred from Simferopol to the K.G.B. office in Kiev, where he read portions of it. The file contained twenty-one confessions of former Treblinka Soviets taken by the K.G.B. between 1944 and 1961. They had been asked to describe in detail the activities of all Red Army defectors at the camp. Each of the statements, of course, mentioned Fedorenko. And every one of them also spoke of the gas-chamber motorman named Ivan. All agreed that his last name was Marchenko.
The existence of the Fedorenko file somehow reached the ears of Prosecutor Mickey Shaked; the Demjanjuk family has never learned the source of the leak. Without the knowledge of either Sheftel or the Israeli Supreme Court, Shaked traveled to Moscow that December. Somehow, Shaked had persuaded the Soviets to transfer the Fedorenko file to Moscow from Kiev. When he read the file, Shaked must have realized that the case against Demjanjuk, on which he had worked so diligently for five years, was in serious jeopardy. (Shaked declined to be interviewed.)
Shaked returned to Israel without the file, but by March 1991 had a copy in his possession. For the next five months, despite repeated requests, Shaked refused to provide a copy to the defense. He finally relented, Ed Nishnic says, after Demjanjuk threatened a hunger strike. (“I can swear to you that’s not true; I never heard about a hunger strike,” says Dafna Bainvol, Shaked’s co-counsel. The reason for the delay was that the file had to be translated from Russian to Hebrew. “It’s very tough work.”) In August 1991, the Fedorenko file was accepted into evidence by the Israeli Supreme Court. Over the next several months, additional confessions taken from Treblinka Soviets between the 1940s and the 1970s were forthcoming. To date there are sixty-one statements in the Supreme Court’s hands.
The statements indicate that the witnesses at the Demjanjuk trial did not exaggerate Ivan the Terrible’s deeds in the slightest. But they consistently describe the operators of the gas chambers as Ivan Marchenko and Nikolai Shelayev. Perhaps the most significant confession is one signed by Shelayev himself. He states that in June 1943, two months before the Treblinka revolt, he and his comrade from the gas chambers, Ivan Marchenko, were transferred to Trieste, Italy, to guard political prisoners. Shelayev last saw Marchenko in the spring of 1944, when Ivan defected to the Yugoslav Communist partisans. His whereabouts after that are unknown. Though Marchenko could still be alive, no government agency or Nazi-hunting group has made any apparent effort to find out. (Shelayev was executed by the Soviets in 1951.)
Meanwhile, Nishnic and John junior received other documents that were, to them, the most shocking of all. Congressman James Traficant Jr., a sympathetic Democrat from Youngstown, had made a Freedom of Information Act request on their behalf, asking for Justice Department records on Fedorenko. He was given cables indicating that between 1978 and 1981 Justice had acquired, via diplomatic pouch from Moscow, excerpts and possibly the full text of some of the same confessions that have now turned up in the Fedorenko file. Traficant even obtained one of the excerpts that Justice had in its files in 1978, from a Pavel Leleko, who recalled that the two Soviets who ran Treblinka’s gas chambers were named “Nikolai” and “Marchenko”—and that this Marchenko was known for severing the breasts of women. At the very least, Justice failed to pursue this significant lead.
AS MORE AND MORE INFORMATION poured out of the Soviet Union, Nishnic learned that Ivan Marchenko had come from the Dnepropetrovsk region of the Ukraine. Last December he went there with Jaroslaw Dobrowolskyj, a Ukrainian-born attorney from Detroit. In the city of Kryvy Rog, they found the apartment of Marchenko’s wife, Kateryna Krawtschenko, and younger daughter, Kateryna Kovalenko. To their dismay, they learned that the wife had died forty days earlier, and that Kovalenko had been a mere infant when her father went off to war, never to return. However, Kovalenko promised to scrounge for a photograph, and directed the two men to her older sister, Halyna Marchenko, who also had barely known her father. Halyna was repulsed when made to understand the nature of Nishnic’s mission. “She said, ‘There must be some mistake, my father was a good man,’” Nishnic recalls. “Then, with tears running down her face, she said, ‘Mama, I’m so happy you’re gone, not to hear what I’m hearing now.’ It was heartbreaking.”
On January 14, 1992, Nishnic returned to the Soviet Union en route to Israel, to pick up Marchenko’s wedding photo, which Kovalenko had finally found. When it was placed side by side with John Demjanjuk’s 1951 immigration photo—the one used in the Israeli-police photo spread—the similarities were striking: round face, short neck, protruding ears.
What did the survivor eyewitnesses have to say about Demjanjuk now?
Pinchas Epstein said, “I don’t know nothing. I won’t speak. After the trial I will speak.”
Eliyahu Rosenberg had this to say: “My kishkes [Yiddish for guts] turn over that, four years after his death sentence, he’s still alive, this mamzer [bastard].”
Josef Czarny said, “I hope the judges will reject the appeal. I hope this on behalf of all the victims of Treblinka who cannot speak. If, God forbid, the prosecution should fail, it would be terrible.”
If the survivors still want John Demjanjuk to be punished, they are not alone. “We are going to prove to the Supreme Court,” says Assistant Prosecutor Dafna Bainvol, “that he is a Nazi war criminal who was at least in Sobibor and Flossenburg.” Thus, in seventeen years, the case against Demjanjuk has come full circle, back to the two original wartime locations alleged by Soviet authorities in 1975.
There has always been a documentary case for putting Demjanjuk at Sobibor. Not only does the posting appear on the Trawniki ID card, but statements from a confessed Sobibor guard named Ignat Danilchenko describe an Ivan Demjanjuk at that death camp. Demjanjuk once even listed Sobibor on a form as a place where he’d spent part of the war. (His explanation: he’d picked the town randomly off a map to reinforce the idea that he was Polish and thus avoid repatriation to the Soviet Union. And, anyway, he thinks he meant to say Sambor.)
The case for Flossenburg is supported by documents that just recently turned up, says Prosecutor Shaked, in German archives. One of these is a Flossenburg logbook that shows a Demjanjuk—no first name—receiving a Czech-made sidearm. More persuasive are two other Flossenburg documents, both of which again list a Demjanjuk with no first name, but with the serial number 1393. This is the same serial number that appears on the Trawniki ID card.
But if Demjanjuk was at Sobibor and Flossenburg, what specifically did he do there? Did he ever kill with his own hands? This may prove impossible to answer because, to date, no survivor from either camp has stepped forward and claimed to remember him. There are only about twenty living survivors of Sobibor. One of these, Dov Freiberg, who was assigned to polish the Ukrainians’ boots at the death camp, has no recollection of Demjanjuk. “If he was in Sobibor,” Freiberg says, “he must have been small, maybe a short-timer. If he was one of the big sadists, destroying the people, I think I would remember him.”
Mickey Shaked, however, seems to have decided on his own what Demjanjuk did at those places. During one hearing before the Supreme Court, he declared, “There is no moral difference whether Demjanjuk pushed one Jewish child into the gas chamber at Sobibor or at Treblinka.” At another hearing, he wove this fanciful description of Demjanjuk: “Day in and day out…he donned his uniform, he took his pistol, put his gun on his shoulder as well, and stood there in his warm clothing and watched the people barefoot marching to the gas chambers and made sure that none of them got away. And even in Flossenburg. he served as [the Nazis’] henchman with the self-same smile that we see across his face here in the hall.”
NOT SURPRISINGLY, John junior calls it an outrage that, after sixteen years of being accused of the crimes of Ivan the Terrible, his father should now have to answer to a different set of charges. Charges, moreover, which John junior insists have no merit.
But what if his father did serve at a death camp?
From his well-considered answer, it appears that John junior has, on some level, already accepted the possibility. “If my father were to stand up today and say, ‘I lied, I was a guard someplace,’ I would have to put that into the context of what happened during World War II,” he says. “Knowing what P.O.W. camps were like—at Chelm, where he testified he was, where people were dying from typhus, dysentery, and starvation. Does a boy put in a position like that, given the opportunity to have a real meal and put meat on his bones, and faced with a choice of living or dying—is he morally wrong for choosing the option of living? Is he any more culpable than the Jew that made the decision to live and spent twelve months pulling gold out of the mouths of corpses? I don’t think so.”
Most Israelis would likely be offended by this analogy, and it is not a valid defense under the 1950 Nazi war-crimes statute. A Ukrainian auxiliary’s presence at a Nazi camp, whatever the reason, makes him guilty of collaboration. But John junior’s provocative question has become the unspoken subtext of the case—evoking the same debate over the cost of survival that brought enormous pain to Eliyahu Rosenberg on the stand. It is surely the reason why the state of Israel has never sought to prosecute a collaborator not known for sure to have committed hands-on murder. And why Israel probably now wishes it had never heard of John Demjanjuk. ♦