Useful Enemies

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While Sheftel was crafting his Supreme Court appeal argument, the Demjanjuk defense got its first big break. A former Polish prostitute who had lived in a village near Treblinka during World War II told all to 60 Minutes.

CHAPTER FIFTY Tick Tock

Her name was Maria (Marianna) Dudek and she lived in Volka Okgrolnik, a tiny Polish village that hadn’t changed much since 1942. The wood houses were mostly in need of paint and repair. The main street was not paved. There was no running water. Horses pulled hay wagons. Cows grazed in backyards. Chickens scratched in the dirt out front. The only concession to the twentieth century was electricity.

Beginning in mid-1942 and ending in August 1943, when Treblinka was liquidated, Iwan Grozny was a frequent guest at Dudek’s house. Demjanjuk supporter Jerome Brentar had visited her five years earlier on his trip to Poland with Frank Walus to prove that John Demjanjuk was not Iwan Grozny. Brentar had testified at Demjanjuk’s deportation hearing that Dudek told him she knew a Ukrainian guard called Iwan. When Brentar showed her a photo of Demjanjuk, she said the man in the picture was not the Iwan she knew. Brentar then asked her if she had ever heard of a Treblinka guard called Iwan Grozny. Dudek slammed the door in his face.

Maria Dudek did not slam the door on 60 Minutes interviewer Ed Bradley. Although she spoke freely about her relationship with the Iwan she knew in 1942–43, Dudek declined to appear on camera because she did not want to be seen or remembered as a former prostitute who serviced death camp guards. The 60 Minutes cameraman managed to get a shot of her wearing a white babushka and peering out her front window.

Dudek told 60 Minutes that whenever Iwan came to visit her, he brought a bottle of vodka he purchased at the village shop run by her husband. She said she was absolutely certain that Iwan’s last name was Marchenko, not Demjanjuk, whom she did not know and whose face she did not recognize.

Both Sheftel and Nishnic were excited by the CBS interview with Dudek, hoping that she would be the big break they needed to save John Demjanjuk from the gallows. In March 1990, two weeks after 60 Minutes aired the Dudek story, the two men paid Maria Dudek a surprise visit. There were two items on their wish list: Find Dudek credible, and convince her either to give videotaped testimony or sign a sworn statement. As insurance, they recruited Dudek’s local priest to help.

Dudek was a small woman, just over five feet tall with white hair, friendly and polite, honored to have the priest in her home, but not pleased to see the American and the Israeli. She served tea under a single, bare lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling. There were no outlets or electric appliances.

After Dudek repeated what she had told 60 Minutes, Sheftel showed her a photo spread that contained a picture of Iwan Demjanjuk. Once again, she failed to identify him. Sheftel then selected the Demjanjuk photo from the spread and gave it to her saying that it was a picture of Iwan Demjanjuk who had just been convicted in Israel of being Iwan Grozny. He would be hung soon if Sheftel could not prove he was the wrong man.

Once again, Dudek said she did not recognize the name Demjanjuk or the man in the picture. But as cooperative and as decisive as she was, Dudek refused to give videotaped testimony or sign a statement. Her priest pleaded with her. It was her duty as a Christian to save the life of an innocent man, he argued. Dudek still refused. If the bishop ordered her to testify, would she do it? the priest asked. Only if Lech Walesa or the pope ordered her to, Dudek said. “I made a big mistake when I agreed to talk to the American television. There are lots of other people who knew Iwan Marchenko. Why are you hounding me?”

Sheftel and Nishnic left Volka Okgrolnik both pleased and disappointed. Maria Dudek had convinced Sheftel, once and for all, that Iwan Demjanjuk was not Iwan Grozny. But without sworn testimony, her positive identification of Iwan Marchenko was at best legally interesting and supportive.

Before returning to Jerusalem, Sheftel and Nishnic stopped in Warsaw to visit the Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes Committed on Polish Territory—the Glovna Komisia, for short. Two commissioners welcomed them. Sheftel asked for any archival documents they had containing the name Iwan Marchenko. There were two. In them, a former Treblinka guard identified Iwan Marchenko as a fellow guard, but he did not name Marchenko as the operator of the gas chambers or as Iwan Grozny. Like Dudek’s interview, the two documents were merely supportive evidence.

What the defense needed was a smoking gun.

Just before they left the Komisia office and to their complete surprise, one of the commissioners told Nishnic and Sheftel that if they wanted to know who Iwan Grozny was, they would have to visit the Ukrainian district court in Simferopol, Crimea, where Feodor Fedorenko had been tried four years earlier, in 1986.

“There in the [Fedorenko] case file,” he said, “you will discover all the material you need about the real identity of the two gas chamber operators at Treblinka.”

As soon as he got back to Jerusalem, Sheftel submitted a motion to the Supreme Court to delay the upcoming appeal arguments once again, so that he could visit the court in Crimea and hunt for an alleged Fedorenko case file. During the hearing on the postponement request, the High Court trumped Sheftel. It had a transcript of the 60 Minutes show and a copy of a 1986 recorded statement made by Maria Dudek’s late husband, Kazhimezh. In the statement, Mr. Dudek not only confirmed what his wife had told 60 Minutes, he went beyond it. He said that Iwan Marchenko, who frequently came to his shop to buy vodka, had confessed “without shame” that he and Nikolai Shelaiev operated the gas chambers at Treblinka.

The court was smitten. The tide was changing.

Both documents were a blow to the prosecution, whose entire trial case had been built around a single charge—Iwan Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible. To refute the new evidence, Michael Shaked offered the court a copy of Demjanjuk’s 1948 application to the International Refugee Organization (IRO) for refugee status. On the form, Demjanjuk had listed his mother’s maiden name as Marchenko. Based on that document, Shaked argued that Demjanjuk and Marchenko were the same person.

OSI had toyed with the same theory in an attempt to reconcile guard service at Treblinka with guard service at Sobibor. Perhaps OSI had shared its reasoning with Shaked.

Like good lawyers, Shaked and Sheftel struck a deal after the postponement hearing. If Sheftel dropped his request for a delay of the appeal argument, Shaked would agree to enter into evidence both the 60 Minutes transcript and the statement of Kazhimezh Dudek.

The marathon to save John Demjanjuk from the gallows was on. The clock was ticking.

At this point in the pre-appeal stage of the Demjanjuk drama, two things were clear. Although the Supreme Court had postponed the appeal hearing for eighteen months after the death of Dov Eitan and the acid attack on Sheftel, it was not about to postpone it again. And once the defense and prosecution finished their appeal arguments before the bench, the High Court would not indefinitely delay its decision just to give Sheftel time to hunt for the ghost of Iwan Marchenko.

Sheftel’s mission was clear: Go to Ukraine. Get a Soviet document proving that Demjanjuk’s mother’s maiden name was not Marchenko. And find the Fedorenko case file. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the Don Quixote mission.

Yoram Sheftel was Jewish.

Because it was difficult for a Jew to get a visa to the Soviet Union in 1990 despite the glasnost thaw, the Demjanjuk family called on Ohio congressman James Traficant for help. A Demjanjuk supporter who had been useful in the past, Traficant agreed to pester the Soviet embassy in Washington to grant visas to Sheftel, Johnnie Demjanjuk, and an American Ukrainian lawyer fluent in Ukrainian who had agreed to travel with them. All three applied separately. All three lied. They said they were going to the Soviet Union to visit relatives.

While he was waiting for the Soviets to grant or deny him a visa, Sheftel argued the Demjanjuk appeal before the Israeli Supreme Court.

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