Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

“Demjanjuk.”

“What is the second biggest picture?”

Judge Levin interrupted. Since Radiwker didn’t paste the pictures on the cardboard pages, he ruled, the question was irrelevant.

“The witness is not a robot ,” Sheftel said in frustration. Levin had just killed his cross-examination. “She’s an attorney. She’s a police worker. If she hadn’t liked them, she could have told her supervisor.”

The defense had run out of line-of-questioning options. Radiwker had proven that her memory was excellent. She clearly explained from memory what she had done, why, and how. And she candidly admitted that the photo spread, which she did not compose, was flawed. She became emotional to the point of tears once and cried on the stand once. But with the help of Judge Levin, or so Sheftel thought, she didn’t crack. She didn’t break. She outlasted two cross-examiners for two days with feistiness and aplomb.

The Demjanjuk trial crept up on Israelis like a morning mist, taking them by surprise, turning Treblinka into a national obsession, albeit briefly. At first, spectators trickled into the gallery of the Hall of the People. Survivors and the merely curious soon became bored with the history lessons, legal games, and incessant bickering at the bench, which they may or may not have been able to hear or follow. But as soon as they learned that survivors would be taking the stand, they came to the convention center in droves, arriving at five o’clock in the morning and standing outside for hours, hoping to get a seat in the gallery or in the adjacent hall with television monitors. All wanted to witness and be part of history. Teachers and their classes. Survivors and their children. Yeshiva students in black. Teenagers in tight jeans.

The Treblinka witnesses might be the last survivors to publicly bear witness in a court of law to the atrocities the Nazis and their collaborators visited on the Jews of Europe. Their testimony would be a parting gift to Israelis, most of whom had either forgotten—or never really learned—the horrendous details of what had happened during the Holocaust, a seminal event in Jewish history.

“This is probably the last time we will bring to trial a major Nazi,” commented a high school teacher attending the trial with his class. “Our generation bears the responsibility to go and listen to this, because from here on in it is only going to be textbook.”

A government official took his eleven-year-old daughter to the trial. “I want her to hear something that she’ll never forget for the rest of her life,” he said, “so that thirty or forty years from now when her children come to her and ask what happened, she’ll have an answer.”

Those who managed to get a seat inside the center were not disappointed. They were swept up in the testimony of the seven men and one woman who wept on the stand, stammered and slumped, and writhed in pain for twelve traumatizing days.

Overcome with grief and anger, an elderly Polish Jew popped up from his bench. “You’re a liar!” he shouted at Demjanjuk. “You murdered my father. You’re a murderer.” If the spectators around him hadn’t restrained the old man, he would have attacked Demjanjuk. Policemen escorted him out of the convention center past hundreds of people pushing and shoving to get inside.

“Order in the court” became an exercise in judicial futility.

The courtroom wept and raged. So did the nation of Israel. Men, women, and children listened to live broadcasts on Channel One radio. At home and at work. On radios in taxicabs and buses. On transistors glued to ears. In cafés and bars. They listened to incomprehensible horror stories about Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, where more than eight hundred thousand Jews were murdered. Treblinka. It was a word tucked in Israel’s distant memory, but little understood.

Until now.

Each witness repeated the testimony he or she had given in Cleveland six years earlier, adding new details about the twisted, sadistic mind of Ivan the Terrible.

Yosef Cherney, who carried corpses from the gas chambers to the burial pits, was so emotionally distraught that Judge Levin asked him to please control himself. “I am trying,” he said through tears. “I am now experiencing Treblinka, Honorable Judges. I am now in Treblinka.”

Cherney spoke in Hebrew in a high, almost feminine voice as he digressed momentarily from his Iwan Grozny testimony. The court was indulgent.

“There was another murderer in Treblinka, not a human being,” he said. “It was a dog. It’s name was Bari…. It was tall with brown spots all over, floppy ears, and big jowls.

“I remember, Your Honors. I remember….” Cherney broke down, then described how one of the guards decided to have a little pre-gas-chamber fun. The guard pointed to a naked man and ordered Bari:

“Mensch, fass den Hunt. [Man, grab the dog],” Cherney said, visibly shaking at the witness stand. “The dog tore the prisoner’s genitals off. And the blood! He cried to us, ‘Save me!’ But how could we? And he walked like that with blood streaming between his legs.

“Can history understand such a thing? Is there a historian who can understand such a thing? Where is he?”

After he finished the story, Cherney seemed to be in a daze, suffering in some secret place. “What am I doing here?” he finally said. “I’m humiliating myself. They don’t know anything. My children. They didn’t know.”

Cherney paused and turned to look at the audience sitting in stunned silence. “Where is my daughter?” he asked in tears. His eyes pleaded for forgiveness. “What should I do? I didn’t want to tell you.”

Eighty-six-year-old Gustav Boreks, the oldest Treblinka survivor to testify, was a barber at Treblinka. He told the court: “The women didn’t want to come in. They were afraid to come in. But Ivan would take his bayonet and force them in with it. He stuck them with his bayonet…. Whole pieces of flesh were hanging from them. The blood was dripping.”

Boreks’s wife and two children were murdered at Treblinka. At times during his testimony, he seemed disoriented, as if trapped somewhere between Treblinka and Jerusalem. He became so confused that when O’Connor asked him how he had traveled from Israel to the United States, he said “by train.” At one point, he simply bowed his head and wept. Bailiffs had to help him off the stand. Judge Levin wished him a long life.

Avraham Lindwasser, who also helped remove bodies from the gas chambers, testified next. “Many of the corpses had cutting and stabbing wounds,” he said. “Wounding and stabbing the victims before killing them with gas in order to fill the gas chambers faster—this was his own personal sadism. It was not for nothing that they called him Ivan the Terrible…. I am now sitting there in Treblinka.”

Yechiel Reichman, who worked near the gas chambers, testified: “I carry this demon within me. I see him everywhere. I see him day and night. I see him in everything with his vicious deeds. I never thought that, in my lifetime, I would have the opportunity to stand and accuse this devil…. In my eyes he was a devil just like other devils…. Sometimes I don’t sleep. And I wake up screaming…. I cannot free myself of this Treblinka.”

The two most important witnesses were Pinchas Epstein and Eliyahu Rosenberg. Unlike Boreks, who was old and confused, they were both in their sixties and had sharp memories.

Choking back tears, Pinchas Epstein, who was seventeen years old when the Nazis took him to Treblinka, told the court about his arrival at the camp in a train filled with Jews driven mad by thirst. The guards had a game waiting for them. A bathtub filled with water.