An historian of the Holocaust, Dr. Yitzhak Arad, presented a detailed description of the “death factory” at Treblinka Tuesday, the second day of the trial of John Demjanjuk, the alleged Treblinka guard accused of war crimes.
Arad, the director of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, told the Jerusalem District Court how nearly 900,000 Jews were put to death in the gas chambers. At the height of the operation, some 15,000 victims were killed at Treblinka every day.
At one point, Arad said, the three gas chambers at the extermination camp were unable to cope with the load and many victims died of exposure and other causes while they were kept waiting in packed railroad freight cars.
The three-judge court overruled an objection by Demjanjuk’s American attorney, Mark O’Connor, that the history of the Holocaust should not be presented at the trial. But the case hinges on the positive identification of Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born former automobile worker in Cleveland, Ohio, as the Treblinka guard known to inmates as “Ivan the Terrible” because of his brutality.
O’Connor contends that the accused is not the Treblinka Ivan and in fact never was in Treblinka. According to the defense, Demjanjuk became a German prisoner of war in 1942 and “at no time during the war was he at any concentration or extermination camp.”
NOT MUCH INTEREST IN THE PROCEEDINGS
The trial opened Monday in a converted movie house, but the 300-seat hall was not full, Haim Guri, Israel’s national poet, reported in Davar Tuesday. He noted that this was in stark contrast to the trial here in 1961 of Adolf Eichmann, the principal organizer of the “Final Solution,” the mass murder of European Jews.
Guri suggested in his commentary that Israel may be too involved with itself and its current problems to bear the pain of re-living the Holocaust. Labor MK Shevah Weiss, a Holocaust survivor and, like the defendant, born in the Ukraine, attended the opening of the trial. “I was in shock. I imagined him (Demjanjuk) killing butchering, strangling,” he told reporters afterwards, recalling his childhood ordeal hidden away with his immediate family by “Righteous Gentiles” while other relatives were murdered.
But Weiss admitted to doubts as to whether the man in the prisoner’s dock was indeed “Ivan the Terrible.” Whereas “there was no uncertainty” about Eichmann’s guilt, “now the uncertainty eats away at me,” he said.
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