Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

At another point, O’Connor asked Rosenberg: “Wasn’t there anything you could have done?” suggesting that he was himself collaborating with the Nazis.

“How could I have helped them?” Rosenberg said. “By screaming? They would have shoved me straight into the pit of blood. Don’t ask me questions like that, I beg you. You weren’t there…. I’ve never been asked such a terrible question. Not even by the worst anti-Semites.”

Rosenberg then pointed at Demjanjuk. “Ask him what would have happened to me!”

Judge Levin noticed that Demjanjuk had muttered something in response to Rosenberg’s outburst. He asked O’Connor what his client had said. O’Connor huddled with Demjanjuk.

“He said,” O’Connor replied, “‘You’re a liar.’”

Rosenberg had written in his 1945 diary, two years after his escape from Treblinka, that Iwan Grozny died during the August uprising.

“How can you possibly come to this court,” O’Connor demanded none too gently, “and point the finger at this gentleman when you wrote in 1945 that he was killed? He didn’t come back from the dead, Mr. Rosenberg.”

Even Demjanjuk laughed.

Rosenberg sat in a chair behind the witness stand with his arms defiantly crossed in front of his chest.

“I didn’t see him dead,” he said. “Others told me.”

Sheftel thought O’Connor’s cross-examination of the Treblinka witnesses was pathetic. Instead of testing their memories on nonemotional issues, he spent too much time grilling them about the shocking details of what they said they saw and experienced. In the end, O’Connor accomplished nothing but to upset the witnesses, further inflame the emotions of the spectators, and try the patience of the judges. No matter how gently or firmly he questioned the Treblinka survivors in his hunt for inconsistencies and memory lapses, he could not shake them from their conviction: John Demjanjuk, sitting seventy feet away from them, was Ivan the Terrible of their nightmares. Just as George Parker had predicted in his doubt memo, they were totally convinced and totally convincing.

If the testimony of the Treblinka survivors united Israel, however briefly, it reopened the wounds of suspicion and racial hatred on both sides of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. For the seventy thousand Jews living along the east bank of the river, the trial evoked memories of pogroms and Ukrainian militiamen helping the Nazis round up, rob, and murder Jews.

“Every nation has its heroes and collaborators,” said one elderly émigré from Odessa who survived by fleeing before the advancing German army, like Miriam Radiwker and her husband. “And it is true that some Ukrainians hid Jews. Unfortunately, however, most of them worked for the Nazis.”

West of the river, Ukrainians blamed the Jews for their own holocaust. “People talk about how we Ukrainians waved flags to greet the Germans when they invaded Ukraine,” the owner of a popular Ukrainian tavern said. “But nobody mentions the way Jews popped up in good positions when the Communists came. They suddenly appeared, running around in red armbands.”

The president of the Cleveland branch of the Ukrainian Congress, which represented most of the 1.5 million Ukrainian Americans, sadly observed: “This case has created exactly what the Jews want to prevent—more anti-Semitism.”

A Ukrainian professor of history observed: “My concern is that when they get done with us, we’ll look like barbarians.” The recent telecast of the docudrama Escape from Sobibor fed into that fear. The three-hour Sunday night movie depicted all the guards at Sobibor as Ukrainians. As Father Stephen Hankevich, the pastor of Demjanjuk’s St. Vladimir’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church, put it: “It is not only John on trial. It is the Ukrainian nation that’s on trial.”

Each side called five expert witnesses to pass judgment on the authenticity of the Trawniki card. As a group, they reviewed every feature of the document—signatures, photograph, printing, typewriter, ink, paper, seals, and blotches. They defended their conclusions for days on end through in-court demonstrations using diagrams, charts, photo overlays and montages, and probability projections. The pendulum of their testimony swung from fascinating to boring. Most of the time it was stuck on boring, which encouraged so much spectator chatter that Judge Levin had to repeatedly call for order because it was hard to hear the testimony.

It was up to the judges to decide who was more expert.

The prosecution opened the face-off with Amnon Bezaleli, chief document examiner of the Israeli police department and head of its identification laboratory. Bezaleli specialized in handwriting analysis, and in particular, in forged drivers’ licenses—three thousand per year—working in a laboratory equipped with state-of-the-art optical tools including comparison microscopes, stereoscopes, infrared and ultraviolet ray scanners, and wavelength gauges.

Bezaleli’s primary task for the prosecution was to authenticate the three signatures on the Trawniki card—SS Major Karl Streibel, supply officer Ernst Teufel, and Iwan Demjanjuk. His secondary task was to examine the printing, ink, and major blemishes on the card. Projecting enlarged photos on a courtroom screen, Bezaleli walked the judges through his analyses for two full days. His conclusions were crisp, clear, and confident:

• The signatures of Streibel and Teufel were authentic with certainty, but the signature of Iwan Demjanjuk was problematic and, thus, only probably authentic.

• Only one typewriter was used for the card—an Olympia model 23 manufactured in 1930. Everything about the typewriter was consistent with a card dating to 1941. There were no discrepancies.

• The stiff green paper used for the card was composed of rag, textiles, and bits of garments. It was a low-quality paper consistent with wartime scarcities, and it dated to the early 1940s.

• Only one kind of ink was used to create the official stamp, which was partly on the photo and partly on the card. The stamp was, therefore, not forged.

• The picture on the card had been reglued at some point. It could not be determined, however, whether the picture had accidentally fallen off the card or had been deliberately removed and replaced.

• Based on all the tests and observations, the card was not doctored in any way, and it was not a forgery, with some degree of certainty.

As decisive and confident as he was, Bezaleli left two big issues dangling: Demjanjuk’s signature could have been forged; and the original card photo could have been removed and replaced with a photo of Iwan Demjanjuk.

The second prosecution witness was Gideon Epstein, who had testified six years earlier as the government’s only expert document examiner at the 1981 Demjanjuk deportation trial in Cleveland. Epstein reached the same conclusions in Jerusalem that he had in Cleveland. They were identical to those of Bezaleli: The signatures of Streibel and Teufel were authentic, and the signature of Demjanjuk was only probably authentic.

In preparation for the Jerusalem trial, Epstein conducted a series of advanced tests he had not had time to perform in 1981. He examined the different color inks on the card, studied the large yellow-orange stains under ultraviolet light, and examined the perforations on the Trawniki card photo that did not appear on the paper it was glued to.

Epstein concluded:

• The writing on the card was done with both a fountain pen and pencils ranging in color from aqua blue to purple-black. Because the use of different colored pencils and ink was common on World War II documents, the color variations were of little significance.