Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

But he did have something to add after all, as Israel was soon to find out.

John Demjanjuk was certainly no Adolf Eichmann, who boasted that he never killed a Jew. Demjanjuk was an alleged death camp guard who sat at the bottom of the Treblinka organizational chart. As Ivan the Terrible, however, he was hardly a cookie-cutter Trawniki man. He was an amalgam of the worst features of death camp guards. A Frankenstein of Eichmann’s creation. A people-janitor responsible for the last cleanup. The effect of Eichmann’s cause. An evil but necessary cog in the wheel of extermination. A monster of unimaginable cruelty who pulled girls from death lines and raped them before driving them into gas chambers. A butcher who sliced off ears. A swordsman who cut and stabbed those who didn’t move deeper into the gas chamber to make room for more victims.

And he enjoyed it all.

The inhumanity of Ivan the Terrible forced Israel to face the horns of a painful dilemma. As a nation, it didn’t want to rip off the scabs of its Holocaust history. Germany should be trying Demjanjuk, not Israel. But Germany was even less eager than Israel to revisit its past, and it didn’t ask for Demjanjuk’s extradition. In effect, it was pushing Israel into a war crimes trial role that posed serious consequences.

If Israel did try Demjanjuk, what about the hundreds of other alleged Nazi collaborators whom the United States was trying for visa fraud, stripping of U.S. citizenship, and deporting? Would Israel have to extradite them, too? Must it become the world’s dumping ground? A graveyard for World War II war criminals?

But the specter of Bohdan Koziy still haunted the conscience of Israeli decision makers.

Bohdan Koziy had been a policeman and Nazi collaborator during the 1941–44 German occupation of Ukraine. OSI tried him in Fort Lauderdale in 1981, two years after Fedorenko faced Judge Roettger and while Demjanjuk was standing before Judge Battisti in Cleveland. Eyewitnesses, supported by some documentation, accused Koziy of murdering Jews in the Stanislau region of Ukraine. One execution stood out from the hundreds of others.

Four witnesses testified at the Fort Lauderdale trial that they had watched in horror as Koziy snatched the preschool daughter of a Jewish doctor from her home. As he dragged the child down the street to the local police station, she cried, “Mother, he’s going to shoot me!” The mother followed behind, begging Koziy to let her daughter go. Koziy took out his pistol. The mother turned her back, unable to watch. He stood the girl at a wall, turned, took three paces, turned again, and shot her.

Koziy lied on his U.S. visa application, saying that he was a tailor’s apprentice and farmer during the war. He entered the United States in 1949 and, after doing menial jobs, saved enough money to buy a motel in Clinton, New York. He later moved to Fort Lauderdale, where he bought another motel.

Unlike Demjanjuk, who pleaded for asylum without choosing a deportation country in case he lost, Koziy wisely chose Costa Rica, which, like Panama, did not have extradition treaties with Germany or Israel. So while Demjanjuk was sitting in an Israeli jail waiting for his war crimes trial to begin, Koziy was a free man sipping rum and Coke in the warm sunshine of Central America.

How many more Koziys would there be if Israel did not take the heavy and unwanted responsibility to act when no one else would?

For Israeli decision makers, to extradite or not to extradite wasn’t just a matter of long-delayed justice for Ivan the Terrible or an opportunity for a momentary catharsis. It was a matter of Holocaust education.

The new generation of Israeli youth, like young Jews everywhere, grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, a sad but embarrassing piece of history that barely touched their lives and dreams. They needed to pierce the fog of that embarrassment before they could see what had happened to their ancestors and why, and how those events helped create and shape the nation of Israel. Ivan the Terrible offered an educational and emotional experience that a Nazi technocrat like Eichmann did not.

The Eichmann trial was about a cold, bloodless man, a plan, and numbers. For the most part, it was an intellectual process. The Ivan the Terrible trial would be about a brutal mass murderer of men, women, and children—the tangible reality behind the cold numbers. It promised to be an intensely emotional ordeal. The question was: As an educational tool, would the trial of Ivan the Terrible be worth all the tears and rage it was bound to evoke? Why not let the Soviets try him and execute him?

For two good reasons:

Hidden behind an iron curtain, a Soviet trial would have no educational value whatsoever for Israelis or anyone else. Nor would it necessarily serve the demands of justice. A communist war crimes trial would always be viewed with skepticism as a KGB-sanctioned sham.

Justice must be done. If not in Germany, then in Israel. Ivan the Terrible must pay and, while paying, educate Israel and the world about what happened in a little-known death camp called Treblinka, where more than eight hundred thousand Jews were murdered, and where a sadistic guard stuffed them into gas chambers and turned on a diesel motor.

Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s foreign minister, spoke for the majority when he argued that the State of Israel was the refuge for tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors. It was a matter of “historic justice” to try John Demjanjuk.

There were contrary voices. Some argued that Demjanjuk was a small fish. If Germany didn’t want to bother with him, why should Israel? To try him would not only set a dangerous precedent; it would also send a message to the world. Israelis are out for revenge. Got more war criminals? Send them to us. Israelis know how to take care of them. The nooses are already tied and swinging.

Others saw a trial of John Demjanjuk as a political liability. It would increase border tension with Lebanon and fuel the hatred of Israel’s enemies. And a dramatic trial might inflame ultratraditionalist emotions that could further divide the nation and adversely affect world opinion.

Still others argued that the trial would be another unnecessary journey into the heart of darkness. What damage might it do to the psyches of the children and grandchildren of survivors? Hadn’t they suffered enough? What good could it possibly do to lead them there again? Wouldn’t it just feed Israel’s self-perception as “victim”? A belief that the world owed it something? “That Israel does not have to feel accountable for its actions as other countries do, because of what was done to Jews in World War II?”

Finally, a Demjanjuk trial would go down forever in the annals of Israeli history as a mini-Eichmann trial and, as such, would reduce the significance of that important 1962 event. As one observer explained, it would be like “restaging a funeral in order to add importance to the deceased.”

The day after he arrived in Israel, John Demjanjuk stood in court and listened to a judge read the charges against him under the 1950 Israeli “Nazi and Nazi Collaborator Punishment Law.” The charges went far beyond the generic and impersonal “crimes against humanity.”

“These Nazi crimes were committed against Jews as Jews,” the judge told Demjanjuk. “Therefore Israel, as the Jewish state, has the right to punish these crimes.”

“I’m completely innocent,” Demjanjuk said in his defense. “I was never in that place what everyone tells me—Treblinka—or a Nazi collaborator. I was myself in a prison camp. How you can transform a POW into a gas chamber operator is beyond me.”

The judge went on to explain that Israeli law prescribes a maximum penalty of death by hanging, but that death wasn’t mandatory.