Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

“So,” said Chumak, who was not about to let him be on this subject, “you don’t write in your document that they told us about it in the forest later, you are writing it as it is happening in the document, which you have admitted your memory was better in ’45 than it is today. And I put it to you that if you wrote this, you must have seen it.”

Again Rosenberg set out to clarify that what he’d written was based, of necessity, on what he had been able to observe as a participant in the uprising and on what all the others had told him afterward, in the forest, about their involvement and what they had seen and done.

Zvi Tal, the bearded judge in the skullcap, stereotypically judicious-looking with his glasses set halfway down his nose, finally interrupted the repetitious duologue between Chumak and Rosenberg and asked the witness, “Why didn’t you point out later, in the forest, I saw, I heard such and such — why did you write it as though you saw it yourself?”

“Perhaps it was a mistake on my part,” replied Rosenberg. “Perhaps I should have noted it, but the fact of the matter is that I did hear all of this, and I have always said that in the course of the uprising, I didn’t see what was happening all around me because the bullets were shrieking all around us and I just wanted to get away as quickly as possible from that inferno.”

“Naturally,” said Chumak, “everyone would want to get away as quickly as possible from that inferno, but if I could proceed, did you see this guard being strangled by everybody and thrown into the well — did you see that?”

“No,” said Rosenberg, “it was told to me in the forest, not just to me, everyone heard about it, and there were many versions, not only that one.…”

Justice Levin asked the witness, “You were inclined to believe what people told you, people who had escaped as you did, to freedom from the camp?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Rosenberg. “It was a symbol of our great success, the very fact that we heard what had been done to those Vachmann s, for us it was a wish come true. Of course I believed that they had been killed and that they had been strangled — it was a success for us. Can you imagine, sir, such a success, this wish come true, where people succeeded in killing their assassins, their killers? Did I have to doubt it? I believed it with my whole heart. And would that it had been true. I hoped it was true.”

All of this having been explained yet again, Chumak nonetheless resumed questioning Rosenberg along the very same lines — “Didn’t you see all of these events, sir, that I have read out to you?” — until finally the chief prosecutor rose to object.

“I believe,” the prosecutor said, “that the witness has already replied to this question several times.”

The bench, however, allowed Chumak to continue and even Judge Tal intervened again, more or less along the line of what he had asked Rosenberg only minutes before. “Do you agree,” he said to the witness, “that it emerges from what you wrote down, if one just reads what you wrote down — that one simply cannot tell what you actually saw for yourself and what you heard about later? In other words, anyone reading this would be inclined to think that you saw everything. Do you agree?”

While the questioning dragged on about the method by which Rosenberg had composed his memoir, I thought, Why is his technique so hard to understand? The man is not a skilled verbalist, he was never a historian, a reporter, or a writer of any kind, nor was he, in 1945, a university student who knew from studying the critical prefaces of Henry James all there is to know about the dramatization of conflicting points of view and the ironic uses of contradictory testimony. He was a meagerly educated twenty-three-year-old Polish Jewish survivor of a Nazi death camp who had been given paper and a pen and then placed for some fifteen or twenty hours at a table in a Cracow rooming house, where he had written not the story, strictly told, of his own singular experience at Treblinka but rather what he had been asked to write: a memoir of Treblinka life, a collective memoir in which he simply, probably without giving the matter a moment’s thought, subsumed the experiences of the others and became the choral voice for them all, moving throughout from the first-person plural to the third-person plural, sometimes from one to the other within the very same sentence. That such a person’s handwritten memoir, written straight out in a couple of sittings, should lack the thoughtful discriminations of self-conscious narration did not strike me, for one, as surprising.

“Now,” Chumak was saying, “now this is really the heart of the whole exercise, Mr. Rosenberg — the next line of what you wrote in December of 1945.” He asked Rosenberg to read aloud what came next.

“‘We then went into the engine room, to Ivan, he — who was sleeping there — ’” Rosenberg slowly translated from the Yiddish in a forceful voice, “‘and Gustav hit him with a shovel on the head. And he remained lying down for keeps.’”

“In other words, he was dead?” Chumak asked.

“Yes, correct.”

“Sir, on December 20, 1945, in your handwriting?”

“Correct.”

“And I suppose this would be one very important piece of information in your document, sir, would it not be?”

“Of course it would be a very important piece of information,” Rosenberg replied, “if it were the truth.”

“Well, when I asked you about the whole document, sir, the sixty- eight pages — I asked you whether you made an accurate and correct version or recital of what occurred at Treblinka. You said, at the very beginning of my cross-examination —”

“I say again yes. But there are things which I heard.”

In front of me young Demjanjuk was shaking his head in disbelief at Rosenberg’s contention that eyewitness testimony recorded in 1945 could be based on unreliable evidence. Rosenberg was lying and, thought the son of the accused, lying because of his own unappeasable guilt. Because of how he had managed to live while all the others died. Because of what the Nazis had ordered him to do with the bodies of his fellow Jews and what he obediently had done, loathsome as it was for him to do it. Because to survive not only was it necessary to steal, which he did, which of course they all did all the time — from the dead, from the dying, from the living, from the ill, from one another and everyone — but also it was necessary to bribe their torturers, to betray their friends, to lie to everyone, to take every humiliation in silence, like a whipped and broken animal. He was lying because he was worse than an animal, because he’d become a monster who had burned the little bodies of Jewish children, thousands upon thousands of them burned by him for kindling, and the only means he has to justify becoming a monster is to lay his sins on my father’s head. My innocent father is the scapegoat not merely for those millions who died but for all the Rosenbergs who did the monstrous things they did to survive and now cannot live with their monstrous guilt. The other one is the monster, says Rosenberg, Demjanjuk is the monster. I am the one who catches the monster, who identifies the monster and sees that he is slain. There, in the flesh, is the criminal monster, John Demjanjuk of Cleveland, Ohio, and I, Eliahu Rosenberg of Treblinka, am cleansed.

Or were these not at all like young Demjanjuk’s thoughts? Why is Rosenberg lying? Because he is a Jew who hates Ukrainians. Because the Jews are out to get the Ukrainians. Because this is a plot, a conspiracy by all these Jews to put all Ukrainians on trial and vilify them before the world.

Or were these nothing like John junior’s thoughts either? Why is this Rosenberg lying about my father? Because he is a publicity hound, a crazy egomaniac who wants to see his picture in the paper and to be their great Jewish hero. Rosenberg thinks, When I finish with this stupid Ukrainian, they’ll put my picture on a postage stamp.