John Gill went home to Chicago leaving Yoram Sheftel without a co-counsel for the Demjanjuk appeal at the Israeli Supreme Court. Sheftel was not disappointed. Since Gill didn’t know Israeli law, to keep him on the defense team would have been unfair to John Demjanjuk, who needed wily Israeli attorneys to argue his case before the High Court.
Sheftel began searching for an Israeli lawyer of stature willing to defend a convicted Nazi collaborator. And there was the rub. It was easy to find attorneys of stature, but nearly impossible to find one willing to suffer the hatred of his countrymen and to risk his life and career for a legal principle.
There was an exception. His name was Dov Eitan, and Sheftel was lucky to get him.
Eitan had been an Israeli judge for seventeen years. In 1983, Eitan was pressured to resign from the bench for engaging in politics as a judge. He had signed a left-wing petition condemning the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and calling for an immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops.
Now in private practice, Eitan watched much of the Demjanjuk trial on television and was deeply troubled by what he heard and saw. Judge Levin was so biased that he was “disgracing Israeli justice.” So when Sheftel invited him to join the Demjanjuk appeal, Eitan accepted, but only if Demjanjuk could convince him face-to-face that he was not Ivan the Terrible.
After interviewing Demjanjuk for hours at Ayalon Prison, Eitan concluded that Demjanjuk was never at Treblinka, and he agreed to argue in his behalf before the Supreme Court. “I want to tell you as clearly as possible,” Eitan told Demjanjuk, “you did not receive a fair trial.” Demjanjuk wept and the death threats against Eitan began. They never let up.
The Demjanjuk appeal was scheduled for early December 1988, eight months after the Levin court sentenced Demjanjuk to death. Eitan would argue the jurisdictional issues—about one-third of the case—and Sheftel would argue both the evidentiary issues and the alleged bias of Judge Levin and his court. A week before the appeal hearing, however, Sheftel got a hysterical phone call from his assistant at eight thirty in the morning. Dov Eitan was dead, she said.
Eitan had arrived at his office in the heart of downtown Jerusalem just after eight, the police reported. No one was there. He left his briefcase on his desk and apparently walked to the eighteen-story City Towers office complex one block away. He entered the building, stepped into an elevator, and pressed the button for the eighteenth floor. When the light didn’t go on, he asked the only other passenger how he could get to the top. The passenger told him that this particular elevator only went to the fifteenth floor. The passenger got off at the seventh floor; Eitan exited at the fifteenth. He walked to a window, opened it, and jumped, landing on the pavement outside a dress shop. There were no eyewitnesses on the fifteenth floor. He did not leave a suicide note.
Sheftel was shocked, then baffled. Suicide? How was it possible? He had chatted with Eitan the previous day and made an appointment to meet with him to discuss the appeal. Eitan had shown no signs of stress. To the contrary, he seemed to be looking forward to his argument before the bench.
Sheftel rushed to Eitan’s home, where he found Eitan’s wife, Miriam, just as baffled. “They say he committed suicide,” she said through her shock and grief. “That can’t be. I don’t believe it…. We ate breakfast together. He told me he was going to his office, and we made an appointment to meet at eleven to buy a new suit for the appeal.”
Could Eitan have been murdered? Did he go to the City Towers to meet someone? Did someone knock him out and shove him out the window? Did someone threaten to kill his wife and family if he didn’t leap? His body was so badly smashed that, if someone had beaten him and tossed his unconscious body out of the fifteenth-floor window, the injury would never be detected.
Just days before Eitan’s death, Yisrael Yehezkeli, a regular spectator at the trial who was frequently heard shouting at Sheftel from his seat, paid a visit to Sheftel’s mother under an assumed name. Yehezkeli was a seventy-year-old Holocaust survivor whose entire family—parents, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins—were murdered at Treblinka by Ivan the Terrible.
“How can you allow your son to defend a Nazi murderer?” Yehezkeli asked.
She told him she had cried when she heard that Yoram was defending Demjanjuk.
You better see to it that your son quits the Demjanjuk case, Yehezkeli warned her. If he doesn’t, he will be killed. So will Eitan.
Yehezkeli had made a similar threat to Eitan and his wife, Miriam.
Mrs. Sheftel took the warning seriously. Her son did not. Why should he? It was just one more threat in a long list. Besides, didn’t the Israeli police and the medical examiner rule Eitan’s death a suicide? Eitan had felt trapped, Sheftel reasoned. Frightened by the death threats, he wanted to drop the case. But he couldn’t because he felt morally obligated to represent his client. Suicide must have been his only way out.
John Demjanjuk and his family were certain that Eitan’s death was no suicide. Right-wing extremists had promised to kill their new defense attorney and they did. In the wake of Eitan’s death, the family was deeply worried about Sheftel, who didn’t seem to take Yehezkeli’s warning seriously. Maybe Sheftel was in denial, talking himself into believing the death of his colleague and friend was suicide because he needed to. Maybe he couldn’t admit that he might be next.
Soon after the memorial service for Eitan ended, Sheftel was heading for the front door of the Sanhedria Funeral Parlor to join the cortege to the cemetery. He stopped to chat with Edna Shabtai, the widow of a famous Israeli writer. Yehezkeli, who was waiting in the lobby, began screaming.
“His face looked like that of a man in a trance,” recalled a journalist covering the funeral. “It wasn’t possible to understand exactly what he was saying, but the general message was: ‘Finally I caught up with you…. Now I’m going to do to you what [the Nazis] did to us.’”
Yehezkeli then tossed liquid from one of two small bottles into Sheftel’s face. Some hit Shabtai as well. Fortunately, most of it landed on the wall behind them.
Sheftel felt a burning pain in his eyes, ran to a nearby sink, and began splashing water on his face. “I went into shock,” he recalled later. “The voice was still shouting, but I could not grasp what it meant…. The pain in my eyes was growing worse. My sight was blurring…. I was terrified I was going blind.”
A mourner hustled Sheftel into his car and rushed him to the Bikur Cholim Hospital emergency room ten minutes away. Doctors washed and flushed his eyes, then gave him the news. It was a hydrochloric acid solution. His right eye was slightly injured and would probably fully recover. His left eye probably would not.
The Israeli police arrested Yehezkeli. Although he pleaded guilty to the assault on Sheftel, he denied having anything to do with the death of Dov Eitan. “All the Jews are happy for what I did,” he bragged. “Let Sheftel be wiped off the face of this earth. I wish that both his eyes would have fallen out…. He poured salt on the wounds of all survivors.”
The maximum sentence for aggravated assault under Israeli law is twenty years. The court sentenced Yehezkeli to three and ordered him to pay Sheftel eleven thousand dollars for the physical injuries he sustained.
As Sheftel was recovering from his eye injury, the pressure from his family, especially his mother, to quit the Demjanjuk case became intense. For two years, he had received death threats almost daily. He soon became inured to them, treating them as emotional bluster and brushing them away like houseflies. Now, because of the publicity and newspaper photos, everyone in Israel who could read knew who he was. And the big white bandage over his left eye made him hard to miss as he walked down the street. Perhaps it was his imagination, but Sheftel swore he could feel hatred burning through his suit.
Sheftel knew he had gotten off easy. Maybe blinded in one eye. Maybe scars like the Phantom of the Opera. But what about next time? And what about John Demjanjuk? How could he “send a man to the gallows just to satisfy Holocaust survivors”?
After giving serious thought to quitting the case, Sheftel refused to give in to fear and pressure. He was a born iconoclast, driven by a desire “to disturb, disrupt, spoil, and explode into fragments, all provocation by the establishment, and the Demjanjuk case was provocation from the beginning.” And now, blind in one eye, he had a “physical bond uniting” him to John Demjanjuk.
Because of the death of Eitan and the serious injury to Sheftel, the Supreme Court delayed the Demjanjuk appeal for eighteen months. Meanwhile, Sheftel flew to Boston to undergo new, radical eye surgery. The Demjanjuk defense fund offered to pay his medical bills and expenses. The operation was a success. In time, doctors told him, his vision would be fully restored. His face would not be disfigured. The only scars would be internal.
