system.”
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While Demjanjuk supporters cried and prayed in Cleveland in the mistaken belief that the ordeal was over for their persecuted son, Jews across the country wailed and raged with blind hatred. “His nationality is enough to make him guilty,” said one Detroit Jew. “Maybe he wasn’t Ivan, but he was Ukrainian, and he had a lot of Jewish blood on his hands,” said another. “If Demjanjuk would stand in front of me now,” said a Cleveland Jew, “I am not responsible for what I would do.”
Amid the anger and hatred, there were calming voices of cold reason. “The rule of law has to govern,” said Zev Harel, president of Kol Israel, a Cleveland organization of approximately 350 Holocaust survivors. Kol Israel was not a lone voice crying in the wilderness of pain. Jewish organizations across the country supported the decision of the Israeli Supreme Court, but with a profound sadness.
There was more pain to come.
The double irony of the Demjanjuk acquittal was not lost on trial observers and pundits. If Yisrael Yehezkeli had not tossed acid in Sheftel’s eyes, the Demjanjuk appeal would not have been delayed for almost two years, the new Marchenko evidence would not have been discovered, and John Demjanjuk would have been hanged. And after the Demjanjuk family and its attorneys had argued for sixteen years that Soviet-supplied documents should not be admitted in court as evidence because they were tainted and not to be trusted, it was Soviet-supplied evidence that saved Demjanjuk’s life.
Although the acquittal in Jerusalem was a moment of relief and joy for John Demjanjuk, his family, and his supporters, it was only half a victory. The High Court noted that the Israeli bill of indictment also charged Iwan Demjanjuk with being a guard at Sobibor, and that there was credible evidence that indeed he had served at that death camp. But the court declined to find him guilty of the charge because the government had chosen to build its entire case around Ivan the Terrible. As a result, John Demjanjuk had been denied a reasonable opportunity to defend himself against the Sobibor charge.
“We saw no room to hold him for another crime,” Chief Judge Shamgar concluded. “The matter is done, but not completed.”
The Supreme Court seemed to be saying, Enough is enough. We legally acquitted John Demjanjuk, but we morally convicted him.
For Holocaust survivors and their families, the acquittal was a betrayal of their suffering and losses, and the deaths of six million Jews. To protect Demjanjuk from rampant assassination threats, the Israeli Department of Justice immediately ordered him to be deported to any country that would take him. Then it did the safest thing it could think of while it waited for a taker.
It arrested John Demjanjuk and sent him back to his cell in Ayalon Prison.
The pot of bitterness boiled for days. U.S. attorney general Janet Reno made it clear that the United States would not let Demjanjuk back into the country. She stood firmly by OSI, which argued that Israel had acquitted Demjanjuk “on a technicality.” The Trawniki card proved that Demjanjuk had been trained at Trawniki and had served as a guard at Sobibor. Either fact made him inadmissible to the United States.
There was one show of generosity. The day after the acquittal, the newly minted Republic of Ukraine extended a warm invitation to John Demjanjuk to come home and stay as long as he liked, no questions asked. Demjanjuk accepted. His life was in constant danger in Israel and he had no idea how many more days or weeks or months he would have to sit in prison, a freed but fettered man.
Three days after he was acquitted, John Demjanjuk was packed, with visa and ticket in hand. He was about to leave Ayalon Prison under heavy guard for Ben Gurion Airport and an afternoon flight on Air Ukraine bound for Kiev when the Israeli Supreme Court ordered his departure to be delayed for ten days. It needed time, the court said, to consider a citizen petition to try Demjanjuk as a guard at Sobibor. The petition was submitted by Kach Party member Noah Federman and Yisrael Yehezkeli, who had been released from prison after serving two years of a three-year sentence for the acid attack on Sheftel.
Demjanjuk asked for a tranquilizer and unpacked his bags.
Two weeks after the acquittal, Israel’s attorney general announced that he would not try John Demjanjuk for allegedly serving as a Trawniki-trained guard at Sobibor, Flossenburg, and Regensburg. He cited three reasons for his decision. If Israel tried Demjanjuk, it could be a violation of double jeopardy protection guaranteed by Israeli law. Furthermore, there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Demjanjuk at the present time, and it was doubtful that the prosecution would ever be able to find enough for conviction. Finally, after seven years of legal proceedings, it would be unreasonable to drag the case out any further.
Three weeks after the acquittal, the Supreme Court convened a public hearing to announce its decision on the petition to retry John Demjanjuk. Given the emotion and death threats, security was extremely tight. Before the court opened for business, Israeli police brought a bomb-sniffing dog into the courthouse to hunt for explosives. During the hearing, armed policemen ringed the courtroom.
Three of the court’s five justices ruled on the appeal. They independently and unanimously upheld the decision of the attorney general. Stressing that “reasonable is not the same as correct,” the judges concurred that it would be unreasonable to retry Demjanjuk, and that the State of Israel would, therefore, not reopen the case.
“We have no choice but to let him go,” Judge Gabriel Bach said.
Reaction to the final decision of the Supreme Court of Israel was immediate, emotional, relieved, reasoned, and hateful. “You bring shame to the Jewish people!” a woman shouted from the rear of the courtroom. “Shame on you!”
“I had two acids. Thirty-two percent and one hundred percent,” Yehezkeli said. “I’m sorry I didn’t use the one hundred percent.” He then tore his shirt as a sign of mourning and, with outstretched arms, shouted at the journalists: “I want to die. Kill me!” Then he collapsed.
“We will make justice,” vowed Kach leader Baruch Marzel. “Demjanjuk will one day be killed by good Jews and not by corrupt Jews like we have in the High Court…. If not in Israel, then somewhere else.”
“As far as I am concerned, the question is not whether John Demjanjuk is an innocent person,” said Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel. “But is John Demjanjuk Ivan the Terrible, or another terrible Ivan?”
“I am very sad,” said a Sobibor survivor. “How can he leave alive from the Jewish state that grew from the mourning of the children of the Shoah [Holocaust]?”
“[Israelis] are fed up with the case,” said Auschwitz survivor Noah Klieger. “A Jewish State can be fed up with a Nazi murderer? How is such a thing possible?”
“Preposterous,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. “We may be losing sight of who the real victims are in this case. They are not John Demjanjuks.”
Meanwhile, in Cleveland, the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had upheld the lower court’s decision both to strip Demjanjuk of his U.S. citizenship and to extradite him to Israel, ruled that Demjanjuk could return to the United States. The court argued that he had been tried in the United States and extradited to Israel as Ivan the Terrible, not as a guard at Sobibor. Furthermore, the Justice Department’s prosecution of Demjanjuk had been careless and sloppy. And finally, given that Demjanjuk’s life was in danger, the humanitarian thing to do was to allow him to come back to the United States, where he would be “safe.”
John Demjanjuk was finally free to come home.
Wearing bulletproof vests under their sweaters and jackets, Johnnie Demjanjuk, his brother-in-law Ed Nishnic, Ohio congressman James Traficant, and two burly off-duty police officers flew to Israel to escort John Demjanjuk back to Cleveland. The vests were not a grandstand play for media attention. Jewish extremists had repeatedly threatened to assassinate “Ivan the Terrible,” and the Demjanjuk family didn’t want to take any chances, especially after the suspicious death of Dov Eitan and the acid attack on Yoram Sheftel.
When El Al commercial flight 001 landed at New York’s JFK Airport on September 22, 1991, a crowd of reporters shouting questions and demonstrators burning effigies of John Demjanjuk were waiting. Wearing a natty white Panama hat, striped shirt, and blue jacket, John Demjanjuk greeted the crowd with raised fists, as he had often done in the Jerusalem courtroom. Then his security team hustled him into a Cessna turbojet paid for by Demjanjuk supporter Jerome Brentar.
