Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Dudek told 60 Minutes that whenever Iwan came to visit her, he brought a bottle of vodka he purchased at the village shop run by her husband. She said she was absolutely certain that Iwan’s last name was Marchenko, not Demjanjuk, whom she did not know and whose face she did not recognize.

Both Sheftel and Nishnic were excited by the CBS interview with Dudek, hoping that she would be the big break they needed to save John Demjanjuk from the gallows. In March 1990, two weeks after 60 Minutes aired the Dudek story, the two men paid Maria Dudek a surprise visit. There were two items on their wish list: Find Dudek credible, and convince her either to give videotaped testimony or sign a sworn statement. As insurance, they recruited Dudek’s local priest to help.

Dudek was a small woman, just over five feet tall with white hair, friendly and polite, honored to have the priest in her home, but not pleased to see the American and the Israeli. She served tea under a single, bare lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling. There were no outlets or electric appliances.

After Dudek repeated what she had told 60 Minutes, Sheftel showed her a photo spread that contained a picture of Iwan Demjanjuk. Once again, she failed to identify him. Sheftel then selected the Demjanjuk photo from the spread and gave it to her saying that it was a picture of Iwan Demjanjuk who had just been convicted in Israel of being Iwan Grozny. He would be hung soon if Sheftel could not prove he was the wrong man.

Once again, Dudek said she did not recognize the name Demjanjuk or the man in the picture. But as cooperative and as decisive as she was, Dudek refused to give videotaped testimony or sign a statement. Her priest pleaded with her. It was her duty as a Christian to save the life of an innocent man, he argued. Dudek still refused. If the bishop ordered her to testify, would she do it? the priest asked. Only if Lech Walesa or the pope ordered her to, Dudek said. “I made a big mistake when I agreed to talk to the American television. There are lots of other people who knew Iwan Marchenko. Why are you hounding me?”

Sheftel and Nishnic left Volka Okgrolnik both pleased and disappointed. Maria Dudek had convinced Sheftel, once and for all, that Iwan Demjanjuk was not Iwan Grozny. But without sworn testimony, her positive identification of Iwan Marchenko was at best legally interesting and supportive.

Before returning to Jerusalem, Sheftel and Nishnic stopped in Warsaw to visit the Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes Committed on Polish Territory—the Glovna Komisia, for short. Two commissioners welcomed them. Sheftel asked for any archival documents they had containing the name Iwan Marchenko. There were two. In them, a former Treblinka guard identified Iwan Marchenko as a fellow guard, but he did not name Marchenko as the operator of the gas chambers or as Iwan Grozny. Like Dudek’s interview, the two documents were merely supportive evidence.

What the defense needed was a smoking gun.

Just before they left the Komisia office and to their complete surprise, one of the commissioners told Nishnic and Sheftel that if they wanted to know who Iwan Grozny was, they would have to visit the Ukrainian district court in Simferopol, Crimea, where Feodor Fedorenko had been tried four years earlier, in 1986.

“There in the [Fedorenko] case file,” he said, “you will discover all the material you need about the real identity of the two gas chamber operators at Treblinka.”

As soon as he got back to Jerusalem, Sheftel submitted a motion to the Supreme Court to delay the upcoming appeal arguments once again, so that he could visit the court in Crimea and hunt for an alleged Fedorenko case file. During the hearing on the postponement request, the High Court trumped Sheftel. It had a transcript of the 60 Minutes show and a copy of a 1986 recorded statement made by Maria Dudek’s late husband, Kazhimezh. In the statement, Mr. Dudek not only confirmed what his wife had told 60 Minutes, he went beyond it. He said that Iwan Marchenko, who frequently came to his shop to buy vodka, had confessed “without shame” that he and Nikolai Shelaiev operated the gas chambers at Treblinka.

The court was smitten. The tide was changing.

Both documents were a blow to the prosecution, whose entire trial case had been built around a single charge—Iwan Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible. To refute the new evidence, Michael Shaked offered the court a copy of Demjanjuk’s 1948 application to the International Refugee Organization (IRO) for refugee status. On the form, Demjanjuk had listed his mother’s maiden name as Marchenko. Based on that document, Shaked argued that Demjanjuk and Marchenko were the same person.

OSI had toyed with the same theory in an attempt to reconcile guard service at Treblinka with guard service at Sobibor. Perhaps OSI had shared its reasoning with Shaked.

Like good lawyers, Shaked and Sheftel struck a deal after the postponement hearing. If Sheftel dropped his request for a delay of the appeal argument, Shaked would agree to enter into evidence both the 60 Minutes transcript and the statement of Kazhimezh Dudek.

The marathon to save John Demjanjuk from the gallows was on. The clock was ticking.

At this point in the pre-appeal stage of the Demjanjuk drama, two things were clear. Although the Supreme Court had postponed the appeal hearing for eighteen months after the death of Dov Eitan and the acid attack on Sheftel, it was not about to postpone it again. And once the defense and prosecution finished their appeal arguments before the bench, the High Court would not indefinitely delay its decision just to give Sheftel time to hunt for the ghost of Iwan Marchenko.

Sheftel’s mission was clear: Go to Ukraine. Get a Soviet document proving that Demjanjuk’s mother’s maiden name was not Marchenko. And find the Fedorenko case file. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the Don Quixote mission.

Yoram Sheftel was Jewish.

Because it was difficult for a Jew to get a visa to the Soviet Union in 1990 despite the glasnost thaw, the Demjanjuk family called on Ohio congressman James Traficant for help. A Demjanjuk supporter who had been useful in the past, Traficant agreed to pester the Soviet embassy in Washington to grant visas to Sheftel, Johnnie Demjanjuk, and an American Ukrainian lawyer fluent in Ukrainian who had agreed to travel with them. All three applied separately. All three lied. They said they were going to the Soviet Union to visit relatives.

While he was waiting for the Soviets to grant or deny him a visa, Sheftel argued the Demjanjuk appeal before the Israeli Supreme Court.

It was May 1990, two years after the Levin court had sentenced John Demjanjuk to the gallows. Sheftel stood alone, wearing dark glasses, before the panel of five Supreme Court justices. It was payback time. Yoram Sheftel was putting Judge Levin on trial and, by extension, the Israeli justice system. And for once, Levin could not object, snarl, insult, bully, or overrule.

Even though his left eye had not completely healed, Sheftel didn’t have to wear dark glasses indoors. He used them merely for dramatic effect, to remind the High Court and the media of how the Demjanjuk show trial had turned into a deadly circus with justice playing the role of ringmaster.

The courtroom chosen for the appeal hearing was the antithesis of the Hall of the People. It was “a chamber of genteel seediness,” not a renovated movie theater. It held only eighty spectators, not three hundred. Television cameras were forbidden. Photographers were excluded during the hearing.

John Demjanjuk sat in a specially constructed wooden cell flanked by policemen. Two interpreters perched behind him. Shaked and four government attorneys sat at the prosecution table for a replay of the David and Goliath battles in Fort Lauderdale, Chicago, and Cleveland. Money versus small pocketbooks. Legal wolves stalking a lone man.