World Notes ISRAEL

Before the verdict was read last week in the Jerusalem courtroom, the defendant complained about a sore back and was carried to an adjacent cell. Thus, after a 14-month trial, John Demjanjuk heard the news by closed-circuit television: a three-judge tribunal ruled that he was Ivan the Terrible, the sadistic guard who helped operate the gas chambers at Treblinka in which 870,000 Jews perished. Like Adolf Eichmann, the only other Nazi war criminal tried in Israel, he could be hanged.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, 68, a beefy Cleveland autoworker extradited from the U.S. in 1986, insisted that he was a victim of mistaken identity. But the judges determined that he "held a central role in the Treblinka order and carried out his tasks with a great deal of enthusiasm." Originally a soldier in the Soviet army, Demjanjuk apparently became a guard after being captured by the Nazis. Vivid testimony came from eight Jews who survived the Treblinka horrors. Demjanjuk's lawyers argued that a survivor could not reliably remember events that occurred so long ago. Responded Presiding Judge Dov Levin: "How could one forget?"