Israel Trial by Bitter Recollection

By William E. Smith

The bald, bull-necked man in the dock sat impassively at the edge of his chair listening intently. Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk, 66, a retired Ohio auto mechanic, was on trial in Jerusalem for operating gas chambers and murdering and torturing victims at Treblinka, the infamous Nazi extermination camp in eastern Poland where at least 850,000 Jews were killed in 1942 and '43. It was Israel's first war-crimes trial since Adolf Eichmann was convicted and executed a quarter-century ago. At issue, however, was not the horrors committed at Treblinka by the Ukrainian guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" but whether he and Demjanjuk are the same man.

No one disputes that Demjanjuk was drafted into the Soviet army in 1940, captured in the Crimea by the Germans in May 1942 and sent to a prisoner-of- war camp in Chelm, Poland. From there the trail becomes murky. According to Defense Attorney Mark O'Connor, Demjanjuk was then transferred to the pro- Nazi, anti-Communist Ukrainian National Liberation Army, and after the war was put in a displaced-persons camp. When he secured a visa to enter the U.S. in 1951, he concealed his military record and claimed to have spent the war years as a forced laborer for the Germans.

Demjanjuk settled in the Ukrainian community in Parma, Ohio, and became a U.S. citizen. He raised a family and worked as an engine mechanic at the Ford plant in Cleveland. In 1981, after the Soviets produced an old ID card in response to a Justice Department query about Demjanjuk's war record, the U.S. revoked his citizenship. Last year it allowed him to be extradited to Israel to face trial on murder charges.

Prosecutor Michael Shaked presented an altogether different story about Demjanjuk's past. From the POW camp in Chelm, Shaked maintains, Demjanjuk was transferred to Trawniki, an SS center used for training guards to work in the concentration camps, and then to Treblinka, where he served between October 1942 and September 1943. The prosecution's primary exhibit is ID card 1393, made out in Demjanjuk's name and supposedly issued at the Trawniki training center. The defense contends that the card is a forgery by the Soviet KGB as part of an effort to harass the Ukrainian community in the U.S.

The case is further complicated by uncertainty about the fate of the real- life "Ivan." Three of Treblinka's 100 or more Ukrainian guards were killed in an abortive uprising at the camp in August 1943. Several escapees, including the late Avraham Goldfarb, have said that Ivan was among them. Last week, however, Prosecution Witness Yitzhak Arad, the director of Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, testified that Goldfarb had not seen Ivan's body and that he himself had been unable to verify Ivan's death.

At the heart of the case, as it unfolds before a three-judge tribunal in a converted movie theater in Jerusalem, is the reliability of human memory. Photographs, maps and records were all burned by the Germans after they razed Treblinka in late 1943. As many as a dozen survivors of Treblinka have previously been unable to identify Demjanjuk as Ivan from photographs. Nonetheless, the prosecution says, it will present five of the camp's survivors who are prepared to identify John Demjanjuk as the demonic killer. The first of these eyewitnesses is expected to testify this week.

With reporting by Marlin Levin/Jerusalem