Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Horrigan conducted the direct examination of Rajchman. His job was to get the witness to identify Iwan as an exceptionally cruel guard, and then identify Demjanjuk as Iwan.

“Do you recall the names of any Ukrainians in camp two?” Horrigan asked.

“I remember them well,” Rajchman said. “The biggest devil, who engraved himself in my memory… was called Iwan. His assistant was called Nikolai.”

After he testified that he saw Iwan herd victims into the gas chamber buildings before Iwan himself entered, Rajchman went on to describe some of the atrocities he saw Iwan commit. One day, Iwan picked up an auger and walked over to a Jew. He ordered the man to bend over, Rajchman testified, then he began drilling into the prisoner’s buttocks. When the man began crying from pain, Iwan laughed and said if he screamed, he’d kill him.

Soon after escaping from Treblinka and while in hiding, Rajchman began a diary. Horrigan asked him to read out loud what he had written in it about Iwan thirty-eight years earlier. The courtroom listened in stunned silence.

“He gets a sharp knife. When a worker runs by, he cuts off an ear. Blood spurts out but he had to run on with the carrier (litter for corpses). Iwan waits until he runs back then tells him to get into the pit where he (Iwan) shoots him.”

Horrigan showed Rajchman the two OSI photo spreads. From both the visa photo and the Trawniki card photo, he identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. Vera collapsed. An ambulance took her to St. Vincent Charity Hospital, where she was treated for hysteria. She would not return to the courtroom for a week.

Martin’s job was to cast doubt that the man Rajchman positively identified as Ivan the Terrible was the John Demjanjuk sitting a few feet from him. Martin couldn’t attack the OSI photo spreads, since they were legally correct. But he could zero in on two physical characteristics in Rajchman’s description of Ivan the Terrible that did not match Demjanjuk—height and hair color. Rajchman’s answers were cagey.

“How tall was he?” Martin asked.

Rajchman pointed to Martin and said to Judge Battisti, “Taller than him.”

“About how much did he weigh?”

“I never weighed him.”

The courtroom burst into laughter.

“Could you give us your best estimate?”

“How can I know what he weighed?” Rajchman said. “I know he was strong like a horse. He carried a long pipe and he split people’s heads with it. That I know.”

“What color was his hair?”

“Not light.”

“Was it dark or black?”

“Possibly dark,” Rajchman said.

“What were his facial features?”

“I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Let me help you,” Battisti said. “Elongated? Was it elongated or long?”

“It’s possible sort of elongated.”

Demjanjuk’s face was oval.

The prosecution called Eliyahu Rosenberg to the stand.

Like Rajchman, Rosenberg was born in Poland, rounded up in the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers and Trawniki men, and taken to Treblinka. Like Rajchman, he carted dead bodies to the pit for several weeks. Like Rajchman, he testified against Otto Horn at the Düsseldorf Treblinka trial. And like Rajchman, he lost relatives at Treblinka. His mother and father were gassed there, and on the very day he arrived at the camp, he pulled a cousin out of the gas chamber with his own hands.

Rosenberg had identified Demjanjuk, but not positively, as Ivan the Terrible from the photo spread Miriam Radiwker had shown him in Israel, the spread that Judge Roettger had called so badly flawed that it could not “pass muster.”

There were two buildings at Treblinka that housed gas chambers, Rosenberg told the court. The smaller of the two had three chambers, which were antiquated and no longer in use. The larger had ten, two rows with five chambers in each with hermetically sealed doors. Each chamber was about eighteen feet long and about fifteen feet high. The walls were cement with white tile up to a point to make the chamber look like a shower room. There was a fake electric light dangling from the ceiling and “shower pipes” through which the gas was delivered. Each chamber held as many as five hundred men, women, and children. A diesel engine supplied the carbon monoxide. On a good killing day, Treblinka could gas five thousand Jews.

At the entrance to the gas chamber buildings, which was stuccoed and whitewashed to look like a bathhouse, was a sign with a quotation from the Old Testament: “This is the gate of the Lord. The righteous shall enter through it.” Along the walls were flower boxes watered and tended by several of the Jews who worked in camp two.

“Who operated the gas chamber?” Horrigan asked.

“Two Ukrainians,” Rosenberg said.

“Do you know their names?”

“Iwan and Nikolai.”

“Did you see them… at the gas chambers?”

“Every day, whenever there were transports.”

“Would you describe this Iwan?”

“He was a tall man about 23, 22, 24 [years old]. He was broad shouldered, round face. He had gray eyes. His ears stuck out a little. Short hair, not especially light.”

The description closely matched the picture on the Trawniki card.

“What do you recall Iwan and Nikolai doing at the time the transports came?”

“They beat people…. Iwan had a… pipe, sword, a whip, and he tortured the victims with them before they entered the gas chambers, especially the women,” Rosenberg said. “He cut pieces between their legs. I saw this with my very eyes.”

Rosenberg testified that he not only saw Iwan drive victims into the gas chamber buildings, but he also saw him enter it, presumably to force them into the chambers.

“Now after they entered the gas chamber, what, if anything did Iwan and Nikolai do?”

“They returned to the room where the motor was, and they activated the motor.”

“Mr. Rosenberg, were you ever present at the gas chambers while they were in operation?” Horrigan asked.

“Yes.”

“Would you describe what you would see at such a time?”

“The outside doors of the gas chambers were closed,” Rosenberg said. “I stood on the ramp, and we waited until the victims had been choked. I heard and saw how they entered the gas chambers. I heard the screams, the crying of the children, ‘Mama, Daddy… Hear, Oh Israel.’ After a short period, about a half an hour, everything was quiet.”

“And then what happened?”

“A German went up, he put his ear to the door, and he said in German, ‘They are all asleep. Open the door,’” Rosenberg said. “We opened the door and… started to remove the corpses…. Practically everyone still groaned.”

Even though Horrigan knew Miriam Radiwker’s photo spread was flawed, he showed it to Rosenberg anyway. Once again Rosenberg picked out Demjanjuk’s photo (no. 16) as Iwan of Treblinka. And from the OSI spread, he picked out the photo on the Trawniki card as that of Iwan.

The next witness was Georg Rajgrodzki, a retired architect who was born in Poland and currently lived in West Germany. Like Rajchman and Rosenberg, Rajgrodzki had carried corpses to the burial pit under the supervision of Otto Horn. Unlike the other witnesses, Rajgrodzki got a personal taste of Ivan the Terrible. Iwan had given him twenty lashes that nearly killed him. Although he recovered, Rajgrodzki knew his days were numbered. A violin saved his life.

One of the Germans found a violin that had belonged to a dead Jew and asked if anyone could play it.

“I can,” Rajgrodzki volunteered.

“Okay, play.”

That day the supervisor of the camp kitchen, an Austrian, happened to be in the small group of Treblinka personnel who had gathered to hear the Jew play. He asked Rajgrodzki to play some Viennese music. The waltz Rajgrodzki selected landed him a cushy job in the kitchen, where he stayed… and played… until the uprising.