A Holocaust survivor stood up in Jerusalem District Court Monday morning and identified accused war criminal John Demjanjuk as the Treblinka death camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.” “There is the man as he was. Here he is standing. Here he is standing,” cried Pinhas Epstein, who arrived at Treblinka when he was 17.
The emotional outburst, the dramatic highlight of the first day of the second week of Demjanjuk’s trial, came after Epstein had scanned photographs of Treblinka shown to him by the prosecution. He had apparently identified the face of “Ivan the Terrible,” who was then in his middle 20s.
His words “the man as he was” referred to a photograph, and “Here he is standing” to the 66-year-old Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born former automobile worker from Cleveland, Ohio, who is the first suspected Nazi war criminal extradited to Israel.
SPECTATORS APPLAUD
Epstein’s putative identification was greeted by resounding applause from the spectators. But the court promptly restored order. Epstein insisted that he could never forget the images of Treblinka, particularly the brutal Ivan, who operated the gas chambers.
“I see Ivan every night . . . I dream about him every night . . . I cannot rid myself,” the witness declared, trembling and in tears as Demjanjuk’s American attorney, Mark O’Connor, cross-examined him in an attempt to prove his memory was faulty.
Epstein broke down several times, notably when he recalled seeing a 12-year-old girl emerge miraculously alive from the gas chamber. “She came out speaking. The people who took the bodies out of the gas chambers made her sit at the side, and her words still ring in my cars,” Epstein said. They were “Yakhtze doma moushi — I want my mother.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
