language — you wrote that he was hit on the head by Gustav with a spade, leaving him lying there for keeps. You wrote that. And you told us that you wrote the truth when you made these statements in 1945. Are you saying that’s not true?”
“No, it is true, this is the truth what it says here — but what the boys told us was not the truth. They wanted to boast. They were lending expression to their dream. They aspired to, their fondest wish was, to kill this person — but they hadn’t.”
“Why didn’t you write then,” Chumak asked him, “it was the boys’ fondest wish to kill this man and I heard later in the forest that he was killed in such and such a way — or in another way. Why didn’t you write it all down, all these versions?”
Rosenberg replied, “I preferred to write this particular version.”
“Who was present with you when this version was given, this version about the boys wanting to kill him, and everyone wanting to be a hero, and killing this awful man?”
“In the forest, when they told this version there were a great many around, and we sat around for some hours before we went our own way. And there, sir, they were sitting down and each was telling his version and I took it in. And this is what I remember, I took this in and I really wanted to believe firmly that this is what had happened. But it had not come about.”
When I looked at Demjanjuk I saw him smiling directly back, not at me, of course, but at his loyal son, seated in the chair in front of me. Demjanjuk was amused by the absurdity of the testimony, tremendously amused by it, even triumphant-looking because of it, as though Rosenberg’s claim that he had reported accurately in 1945 what his sources, unbeknownst to him, had themselves reported inaccurately was all the exculpation necessary and he was as good as free. Was he dim-witted enough to believe that? Why
“Now,” Chumak continued, “based on the Version’ as you now call it, this version of Ivan being killed, he was struck in the head with a spade. Would you therefore expect, sir, the man who was struck with the spade to have a scar or a fractured skull or some serious injury to his head? If that happened to Ivan in the engine room?”
“Of course,” replied Rosenberg, “if I were sure he had been hit and in accordance with the version I wrote down, he was then dead — where is the scar? But he wasn’t there. And he wasn’t there — because he wasn’t there.” Rosenberg looked beyond Chumak now and, pointing at Demjanjuk, addressed him directly. “And if he had been there, he would not be sitting across from me. This hero is grinning!” Rosenberg cried in disgust.
But Demjanjuk was no longer merely grinning, he was laughing, laughing aloud at Rosenberg’s words, at Rosenberg’s rage, laughing at the court, laughing at the trial, laughing at the absurdity of these monstrous charges, at the outrageousness of a family man from a Cleveland suburb, a Ford factory employee, a church member, prized by his friends, trusted by his neighbors, adored by his family, of such a man as this being mistaken for the psychotic ghoul who prowled the Polish forests forty-five years ago as Ivan the Terrible, the vicious, sadistic murderer of innocent Jews. Either he was laughing because a man wholly innocent of any such crimes had no choice but to laugh after a year of these nightmarish courtroom shenanigans and all that the judiciary of the state of Israel had put him and his poor family through or he was laughing because he was guilty of these crimes, because he
Still laughing, Demjanjuk rose suddenly from his chair, and, speaking toward the open microphone on the defense lawyers’ table, he shouted at Rosenberg,
Demjanjuk had spoken in Hebrew — for the second time the man accused of being Ivan the Terrible had addressed this Treblinka Jew who claimed to be his victim in the language of the Jews.
Justice Levin spoke next, also in Hebrew. On my headphones I heard the translation. “The accused’s words,” Justice Levin noted, “which have been placed on record — which were, ‘you are a liar!’ — have been — have gone on record.”
Only minutes later, Chumak concluded his examination of Rosenberg, and Justice Levin declared a recess until eleven. I left the courtroom as quickly as I could, feeling bereft and spent and uncomprehending, as numb as though I were walking away from the funeral of someone I dearly loved. Never before had I witnessed an encounter so charged with pain and savagery as that frightful face-off between Demjanjuk and Rosenberg, a collision of two lives as immensely inimical as any two substances could be even on this rift-ravaged planet. Perhaps because of everything abominable in all I’d just seen or simply because of the unintended fast I’d been on now for almost twenty- four hours, as I tried to hold my place amid the spectators pushing toward the coffee machine in the snack bar off the lobby, there was a ragged overlay of words and pictures disturbingly adhering together in my mind, a grating collage consisting of what Rosenberg should have said to clarify himself and of the gold teeth being pulled from the gassed Jews’ mouths for the German treasury and of a Hebrew- English primer, the book from which Demjanjuk had studiously taught himself, in his cell, to say correctly, “You’re a liar.” Interlaced with
So now I was seeing things too. Working the cash register from atop a stool in the snack bar was just another old man with a bald head and a scaling skull, who could not possibly have been the retired New York jeweler disenchanted with Israel. I’m seeing double, I thought, doubles, I thought, but because of not eating, because of barely getting any sleep, or because I’m coming apart again for the second time in a year? How could I have convinced myself that I alone am personally responsible for overseeing the safety of Demjanjuk’s son if I
But just then I heard shouting outside the building and, through the glass doors, saw two soldiers armed with rifles running at full speed toward the parking lot. I ran out of the lobby after them, toward where some twenty or thirty people had now gathered to encircle whatever disturbance was transpiring. And when I heard from within that circle a voice loudly shouting in English, I knew for sure that he was here and the worst had happened. The all-out paranoid who I had by now become was asserting his panicked confidence in the unstoppable unraveling of the disaster; our mutual outrage with each other had been churned into a real catastrophe by that octopus of paranoia that, interlinked, the
But the man who was shouting looked to be nearly seven feet tall, taller by far than either Pipik or me, a treelike person, a gigantic redheaded creature with an amazing chin the shape of a boxing glove. His big bowl of a forehead was flushed with his fury, and the hands he waved about high in the air looked to be as large as cymbals — you wouldn’t want your two little ears caught between the clanging of those two huge hands.
In either hand he clutched a white pamphlet, which he fluttered violently over the heads of the onlookers. Although a few in the crowd held copies of the pamphlet and were flipping through its pages, mostly the pamphlets were strewn on the pavement underfoot. The Jewish giant’s English was limited, but his voice was a large, cascading thing, every inch of him in that swelling voice, and when he spoke the effect was of someone sounding an organ. He was the biggest and the loudest Jew that I had ever seen and he was booming down at a priest, an elderly, round-faced Catholic priest, who, though of medium height and rather stoutly built, looked, by comparison, like a little, shatterable statuette of a Catholic priest. He stood very rigidly, holding his ground, doing his best not to be intimidated by this gigantic Jew.
I stooped to pick up one of the pamphlets. In the center of the white cover was a blue trident whose middle prong was in the shape of the Cross; the pamphlet, a dozen or so pages long, bore the English title “Millennium of
