Operation Shylock

indecipherable and intellectually impenetrable than to attempt to make causal sense of what is unknown with a fantasy that is mad. Better, I thought, that the events of these three days should remain incomprehensible to me forever than to posit, as I had just been doing, a conspiracy of foreign intelligence agents who are determined to control my mind. We’ve all heard that one before.

* * *

Mr. Rosenberg had been recalled to be questioned about a sixty- eight-page document that only now, in the closing hours of the yearlong trial, had been discovered by the defense at a Warsaw historical institute. It was a 1945 report about Treblinka and the fate of the Jews there, written in Eliahu Rosenberg’s own hand and in Yiddish, his first language, nearly thirty months after his escape from Treblinka, while he was a soldier in the Polish army. Encouraged to recount the story of the death camp by some Poles in Cracow, where he was then billeted, Rosenberg had spent two days writing down his memories and then gave the manuscript to a Cracow landlady, a Mrs. Wasser, to pass on to the appropriate institution for whatever historical usefulness it might have. He had not seen his Treblinka memoir again until on that morning a photocopy of the original was handed to him on the witness stand and he was asked by defense counsel Chumak to examine the signature and to tell the court if it was his own.

Rosenberg said it was, and when there was no objection from the prosecution, the 1945 memoir was admitted into evidence “for the purposes,” said Justice Levin, “of questioning the witness in conjunction with what it states in same on the events of the uprising at Treblinka on the second of August, 1943. And specifically,” Levin continued, “on the subject of the death of Ivan as written down in said statement.”

The death of Ivan? At the sound of those four words coming through the earphones in English translation, young Demjanjuk, seated directly in front of me, began to nod his head vigorously, but otherwise there wasn’t a movement to be discerned in the courtroom, not a sound was to be heard until Chumak, with his confident matter- of-factness, set out in his Canadian-accented English to review with Rosenberg the relevant pages of this memoir, in which, apparently just months after the end of the European war, Rosenberg had written of the death of the very man into whose “murderous eyes” he had gazed with such horror and revulsion back on the seventh day of the trial, or so he had sworn.

“I would like to go directly to the relevant portion with Mr. Rosenberg, where you wrote, ‘After a few days, the date for the uprising was set for the second day of the eighth month with no excuse’ — can you find that on page sixty-six of the document?”

Chumak then took him through his description of the heat in the middle of the day of August 2, 1943, a heat so fierce that the “boys,” as Rosenberg had described his fellow death commandos, who had been working since four a.m., sobbed from pain and fell down with the stretchers while transferring exhumed corpses to be incinerated. The revolt had been set for four p.m., but fifteen minutes before, there was a hand-grenade explosion and several shots rang out, signaling that the uprising had begun. Rosenberg read aloud the Yiddish text and then translated into Hebrew a description of how one of the boys, Shmuel, was the first to run out of the barracks, loudly shouting the uprising’s passwords, “Revolution in Berlin! There is a revolt in Berlin!” and how Mendel and Chaim, two other boys, then jumped the Ukrainian barracks guard and took the rifle from his hands.

“Now you wrote these lines, sir, and they are correct,” said Chumak. “That’s what happened at the time, is that correct?”

“If it pleases the court,” said Rosenberg, “I think I have to explain. Because what I say here, I had heard. I hadn’t seen it. There’s a big difference between the two.”

“But what you just read to us, sir, that Shmuel was the first to leave the barracks. Did you see him leave the barracks?”

Rosenberg said that no, he hadn’t seen it himself, and that in much of what he’d written he had been reporting what others had seen and what they had told one another once they had gotten over all the fences and safely escaped into the forest.

“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 Vachmanns, 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