Behind the Headlines the Impact of the Demjanjuk Trial

Two 14-year-old school girls braved the Jerusalem winter and the wrath of their teacher last week to wait in line from six a.m. for seats at the Demjanjuk trial. As it turned out, their teacher was far from angry and used their experiences as a basis for the class discussion next day. She had already reserved seats for the class to attend the war crimes hearings in six weeks time.

The queues outside the Jerusalem concert-hall-turned-courtroom are so long each day that the authorities have opened an additional hall with simultaneous television transmission of the trial.

Some of the regular spectators are themselves Holocaust survivors — one bearded man, who does not fail to come to each session, lost his wife and two children at Auschwitz.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir attended an afternoon session and Gen. Yossi Peled, commander of the northern front, sat barely hiding his emotions, as he remembered the sound of the gestapo jackboots over the cellar in Poland where he was hidden as a child of four.

DAILY HEART-RENDING PROCEEDINGS

The heart-rending proceeding of the trial of John Demjanjuk, accused of slaughtering tens of thousands of Jews at the Treblinka gas chambers, follow Israelis wherever they go.

Bus passengers sit silent as they listen to the radio transmission of the hearings over the bus loudspeaker. Every corner grocery store seems to have the radio tuned in to the trial, and drivers stare grimly ahead as they hear the gory details of the daily business of death at Treblinka. It is the minutiae of the running of the death camp that are being described — at exactly which window did the witness sit as he sorted the gold teeth he had to tear from the mouths of the corpses? What was the exact construction of the incinerator where the bodies were burned when the Nazis realized the burial pits were too full? Who was the SS man who identified Jews showing marks from beatings the previous day and then had them shot?

One question of detail made the President of the court, Justice Dov Levin, show a rare flash of anger. “How can you ask where exactly the washing was hung in a place where 850,000 Jews were killed?” Levin pleaded. But when Demjanjuk’s attorney, Mark O’Connor, insisted he needed that detail, the judge allowed the question to be asked.

TESTING WITNESSES’ MEMORIES

American Attorney O’Connor appears to be testing the memory of the witnesses. Sometimes he discovers inconsistencies between their evidence now and their testimony at the Eichmann trial in 1961, or in sworn statements to Yad Vashem Holocaust Center researchers.

O’Connor does not question the terrible experiences of these survivors of Treblinka, but he does challenge their ability to remember the face of their tormentor, known at Treblinka as “Ivan The Terrible.”

The witnesses have all identified photos allegedly of Ivan, the then 25-year-old mechanic who operated the equipment for the gas chamber, and who delighted in beating his victims before they went to their deaths

Yehiel Meir Raichman, a survivor now living in Uruguay, recalled an occasion when Ivan, hearing the wails of a new transport of Jews arriving at the gas chamber, eagerly left the supply cart he was driving and ran to fetch his iron bar to join the guards beating the Jews.

THE MAIN DOCUMENT PRESENTED

The main document presented so far by the prosecution is an SS identity card, received recently from Moscow, bearing Demjanjuk’s name and picture. The defendant, who as a Ukrainian had served in the Red Army, claims to have been captured by the Germans and placed in a Prisoner of War camp during the period he is accused of being at Treblinka.

O’Connor says this document, which the prosecution obtained through the Israeli Foreign Ministry with the help of American-Jewish oil tycoon Armand Hammer, is a KGB forgery. He claims that the Russians want revenge against Ukrainians who left the USSR and settled in the United States. The defense attorney says he has an expert who can prove the forgery chemically but that the prosecution fears he will destroy the evidence.

The defense also plans to bring seven witnesses, whom O’Connor refuses to identify, to testify on Demjanjuk’s behalf.

Meanwhile, conversations the accused had in his Israeli prison with a Russian-speaking police officer disguised as a prison warder were reported to the court.

Chief Superintendant Arye Kaplan, who immigrated from the Soviet Union in 1973, related how Demjanjuk continually protested his innocence.

However, on several occasions the defendant challenged Kaplan with the statement: “When your commanding officer orders you to do something, you obey.” (The prosecution claims Demjanjuk agreed to take the position at Treblinka in order to escape the rigors of the German POW camp.) And, when referring to Jews, Demjanjuk used the derogatory Russian term “Zhid.”