Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

“She isn’t quite as tearful as she may appear to you,” Levin replied. “Auschwitz is not something that a Jew can mention with joy, to say the least. Only with deepest sadness…. But she can respond. She will respond. She’s prepared to respond.”

It was as if Levin were telling O’Connor, “You may need a break. She doesn’t.”

Radiwker retired from the Nazi investigation unit in 1976 at the age of seventy, as Israeli labor law required, but she stayed on as a special contract employee, working four days a week instead of six. The Nazi unit assigned her to investigate the nine Ukrainian suspects on the American INS list.

Radiwker had testified earlier under direct examination that she didn’t know anyone on the list, including Demjanjuk and Fedorenko, and that her superior gave her three “ready-made” pieces of cardboard with a total of seventeen photos pasted on them. During her testimony at the Fedorenko trial eight years earlier, however, she had said through an interpreter that she herself arranged and pasted the photos.

O’Connor was eager to exploit the contradiction. But Radiwker stopped him cold. “That was not true ,” she snapped back. “It was my job to show the witnesses these photographs. That’s what I did.” The interpreter had mistranslated, she said.

Radiwker’s explanation was more than plausible. Simultaneous courtroom translations were always a problem, as the Jerusalem trial itself illustrated. The proceedings were conducted in Hebrew with witnesses testifying in Hebrew, German, English, Dutch, and Ukrainian. Levin was constantly telling attorneys and witnesses alike to slow down, to wait for the translation. And witnesses were frequently confused by imprecisely translated questions.

O’Connor next questioned Radiwker about who had supplied the background information on each of the names the INS sent the Israeli police for investigation. It was an obvious gimmick to sneak the KGB into the courtroom.

“Do you know what the origin of that information was?” O’Connor asked. “Did it come from sources in the United States or did it come from sources in the Soviet Union?”

“I don’t know,” Radiwker said. “I don’t know where the Americans got their information.”

“At any time in 1976, or subsequent to 1976, did it come to your attention, ma’am, that the charges related to [Demjanjuk] came from the Soviet Union?”

“I had no information about any connection with Russia or any information that might have come from Russia.”

The mouse had the cat in a corner. O’Connor had failed to prove that Radiwker arranged the faulty photo spread, was biased because she knew about Demjanjuk before she got the assignment to investigate the nine alleged Nazi collaborators on the INS list, or heard about the Soviet-supplied Trawniki card. He didn’t have many moves left.

“When you took [their statements],” he asked, “they were not taken down by means of an electronic device such as a tape recorder?”

“We were not so sophisticated yet.”

O’Connor had finally scored a point. In 1976, the tape recorder was a common tool in criminal investigations around the world. By failing to use one in their investigation of alleged war criminals who might stand trial one day, the Israeli police showed themselves to be either amateurs, careless, or penny pinchers.

O’Connor moved on to the list of names corresponding to the numbers under each picture in the photo spread. He was hoping to establish that Radiwker had made it easy for the witnesses to identify Demjanjuk as Iwan of Treblinka because they could see the list. If they could, the identification process would be compromised. Once again, Radiwker dashed his hope.

“There was such a list,” she admitted. “But it was [hidden] so that the witness could not possibly see it.”

O’Connor returned to the Fedorenko trial. Radiwker stayed in the same Florida motel as the Treblinka witnesses and dined with them. Thus she had had an opportunity to coach the witnesses. O’Connor suggested that she must have chatted with them about the trial and Judge Roettger. Radiwker vehemently denied fraternizing. O’Connor then tried to show that she had a motive for coaching them. Knowing that she had been upset at the way Judge Roettger treated the witnesses during the trial, he asked her about Roettger’s bench examination of the Treblinka survivors.

“I cannot describe for you the kind of treatment they received,” Radiwker said with a passion bordering on anger. “Every witness a liar, a deceitful person.”

O’Connor went in for the kill. “Is it not true, ma’am, that there was some indication by this judge that, in fact, the witnesses you had examined were coached?”

“My witnesses don’t need coaching,” Radiwker replied.

O’Connor had nothing more to add and no new lines of questioning to open. He ended his half of the cross-examination of Miriam Radiwker with what amounted to an admission of defeat.

“I would like to take this opportunity, Your Honor,” he said, “to thank this witness for tolerating all these hours of questioning, her patience, her unbelievable intellect, her absolutely unbelievable physical stamina and strength…. I have nothing but admiration for her.”

“Thank you very much,” Radiwker said. “I am not feeling well.”

Sheftel relieved O’Connor.

Yoram Sheftel felt at home in the Hall of the People. As a defense attorney in high-profile drug, murder, robbery, and rape cases—he once defended Miami mob boss Meyer Lansky, who had sought refuge in Israel—he was no stranger to the judges sitting before him. Iconoclastic, cocky, and smart, he wasn’t afraid to brawl with the bench. And from the very first legal argument the defense lost, he knew without a doubt that John Demjanjuk would never get a fair trial in Dov Levin’s courtroom.

Shefy, as Sheftel liked to be called, had understood when he accepted, over the fears of his own family, O’Connor’s invitation to codefend John Demjanjuk that he would become the hate object of survivors and religious extremists alike. Shefy didn’t care. If there was anyone he held in contempt it was the cowards and hypocrites who avoided doing what was right out of fear of public opinion. Shefy refused to be one of them.

Before he agreed to join the defense team, Sheftel had interviewed John Demjanjuk in his prison cell. He found the American to be a very simple man—like the Ukrainian peasants his grandmother had told him about—with a poor memory, easily confused, and emotionally dependent on Mark O’Connor. At the end of the two-hour interview, Demjanjuk had passed the Shefy smell test—an intuition that the accused wasn’t lying.

Besides believing that John Demjanjuk was innocent, Sheftel was convinced that Mark O’Connor could never win without him. For one thing, O’Connor was sure to drown in the sea of Israeli law. But more important, Sheftel believed the American was simply incompetent. After hearing O’Connor’s opening statement on the first day of the trial, Sheftel concluded that the guy didn’t know what he was talking about. And after O’Connor’s cross-examination of Miriam Radiwker, which Sheftel considered senseless, embarrassing, and ultimately damaging, he discovered that O’Connor didn’t even prepare for his witness examinations. Even worse, he refused to listen to advice on which points to raise.

In sum, Sheftel believed that the entire Demjanjuk case would rest on his shoulders.

Besides knowledge of Israeli law, Sheftel brought to the defense another valuable skill. His father was from Caucasia and his mother was a Ukrainian Jew from Rovno, the site of the POW transit camp where Demjanjuk was briefly imprisoned after his May 1942 capture in Kerch. Having learned Russian from his parents, Sheftel was able to speak directly to Demjanjuk, who also spoke Russian, without the filter of a translator.