Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

“Anyone who got near it was terribly beaten by the [guards],” Epstein said. “I saw bodies with their heads split open.”

Epstein paused, unable to continue.

“I know it’s hard for you,” Judge Levin said. “But please go on.”

“It was horrible to look at the corpses that were removed from the chambers,” Epstein said. “People with crushed faces. People with stab wounds. Pregnant women stabbed in their bellies. Women with their fetuses hanging half out. Young girls with stab wounds on the breasts, with eyes gouged out.”

One of Epstein’s memories was especially painful. He recalled how Jewish workers pulled a twelve- or fourteen-year-old girl out of the gas chamber. By some miracle, she was still alive and breathing. They sat her down.

“Her words are still ringing in my ears,” Epstein said. “Ya chze Mamusy [I want my Mommy].”

The convention center sobbed.

Epstein paused and took a drink of water. “I have a granddaughter her age,” he said. Then he removed his glasses and dried his eyes.

Iwan was amused by the scene, Epstein continued. He singled out a young Jew named Djoubas and began whipping him without mercy.

“Iwan ordered him: ‘Take down your pants,’” Epstein said. “I am ashamed to repeat before this Honorable Court the word that Iwan said.”

Epstein paused, once again biting back tears.

“‘ Come fuck!’ And Djoubas mounted this child,” Epstein said. “They took the girl to where they took all the corpses and shot her. I would find difficulty in comparing Iwan even to an animal, because I know that an animal, if sated, does not attack…. Iwan was never sated. He would prey every day, every moment… a monster from another planet.”

Epstein went on to describe how the gruesome work of taking corpses from the gas chambers affected the Jews forced to do it. “There wasn’t a night that someone didn’t hang himself,” he told the court. “It was mostly people who the day before had recognized a wife, father, or relative among the dead they cleared out of the gas chamber.”

Epstein pointed at Demjanjuk sitting barely seventy feet away. “He’s sitting here!” he cried, pounding the podium with his fists to applause from the gallery. “I dream about him every single night…. He is etched in me. In my memory. Every night. I cannot free myself…. This is the man…. I remember him. I see him, I see him, I see him!”

Epstein apologized to the court for his outburst.

Eliyahu Rosenberg, who had carried corpses to the burying pits, testified: “There was a thick, viscous material, almost like lava from a volcano, which bubbled on the top of the pits. The earth would rise and then subside. As it fell, we would be ordered to throw in another layer of bodies.”

He described how a group of Jewish children ran naked into a gas chamber one winter day to escape the subzero weather. “They saw a door and ran in just to get out of the cold.”

He recalled how an SS guard saved his life. Iwan had ordered him to have intercourse with a dead woman. In panic, he ran toward Iwan’s boss, SS Sergeant Fritz Schmidt, and told him what Iwan said. Rosenberg couldn’t do it. He’d rather die. “I’ll deal with Iwan,” Schmidt said. And he did. Rosenberg lived. Saved by a Nazi.

He told the court how Iwan once gave him thirty lashes for stealing bread and made him count the lashes out loud. After each, he had to say “thank you.”

He told the court that the designer of the gas chamber placed a window in the door so an observer could watch the Jews die. The window was useless because the breaths of the dying fogged it up.

He described what death sounded like outside the chambers: “Suddenly the engine began making a loud noise and terrible screams were emitted from the gas chambers. ‘Mama, Tatta, Shma Israel [Hear, Oh Israel], Ruchaleh, Moshe.’ And the walls trembled. And we outside trembled, too. At long last, it subsided, and I could hear the moaning of the people, and then slowly—ever so slowly—it died out.”

Rosenberg used Yiddish when he recalled what Schmidt said: “Ale shluft.” They’re all asleep.

The courtroom grew quiet and tense when a prosecutor showed Miriam Radiwker’s photo spread to Rosenberg. He identified photo sixteen as that of Iwan Grozny. “You told Mrs. Radiwker if you saw Iwan alive,” the prosecutor reminded him, “you would recognize him.”

“I request that the honorable court order him to take off his glasses,” Rosenberg said.

“His glasses,” Judge Levin said. “Why?”

“I want to see his eyes.”

O’Connor objected, then he approached the bench. After a brief word with Judge Levin, O’Connor agreed to Rosenberg’s request. “My client has nothing to hide.”

Demjanjuk took off his glasses and stood. Pointing to a spot right in front of him, Demjanjuk said: “Mr. Rosenberg, would you please approach? Right here.”

Rosenberg left the witness stand and quickly walked over to Demjanjuk, never taking his eyes off him, while spectators shouted, “Murderer… to the gallows!”

Six feet tall and standing on a platform, Demjanjuk towered over Rosenberg.

“Look at me!” Rosenberg demanded.

The courtroom was quiet now as spectators watched, frozen in anticipation and shock. No one coughed or stirred.

Demjanjuk smiled and met Rosenberg’s stare. Then he offered Rosenberg his hand and said, “Shalom!”

Rosenberg stumbled backward into the arms of the guards. “Murderer!” he cried out with clenched fists. “How dare you put your hand out to me!”

Rosenberg’s wife, who was seated in the third row, screamed and fainted into the arms of her daughter. The police carried her out while bailiffs led Rosenberg back to the witness stand, where he rested his head on the podium. There was so much shouting and screaming in the courtroom that it looked as if the session was over. After repeated tries, Judge Levin restored order.

“You were asked to come close,” Judge Levin said to Rosenberg. “You stopped and looked. What is your answer?”

Rosenberg gripped the witness stand and yelled:

“This is Iwan. I say so without hesitation and without a shadow of a doubt. It is Iwan from the gas chambers, the man I am looking at now. I saw his eyes. I saw those merderische oygen! ” Those murderous eyes!

After he calmed down, Rosenberg said in a philosophical tone, “He who has been in Treblinka will never get out. He who has not been there will never get there.”

Mark O’Connor and John Gill got stuck with the delicate and thankless job of questioning the Treblinka survivors. Sheftel didn’t have the stomach for it. “No way will I cross-examine survivors of Treblinka,” he had told O’Connor before he agreed to serve as co-counsel. “I can’t.” Eventually, he agreed to question them only on police procedures used in the identification process.

O’Connor and Gill believed the survivors’ stories about Ivan the Terrible and were deeply moved by their suffering. But both attorneys were convinced that the survivors were pointing their collective finger at the wrong man. The defense’s job was to cast doubt on the reliability of their memories. Unlike Judge Roettger’s examination, O’Connor and Gill were gentle but grueling.

At one point during his questioning of Sonia Lewkowicz, who did the laundry in a building near the gas chambers, in order to test her memory Gill asked where she hung up the guards’ shirts and socks to dry.

Judge Levin lost his cool. “Is it important to know where they hung up the laundry?” he asked. “There is a limit to what you can ask. What is the difference where the laundry was hung when 850,000 human beings were killed at Treblinka?”