heart. The Orthodox-Byzantine Church of Sts. Peter and Paul was the mother church from which radiated a string of parishes and parochial schools that taught Ukrainian language, culture, and catechism. There were Ukrainian newspapers, youth organizations, and music academies that taught traditional Ukrainian instruments, dances, and folk songs. In fact, the Cleveland Ukrainian community offered so many services in the native language that fluency in English, although an asset, was not a necessity.
Ivan felt at home among his fellow anticommunist Ukrainians, many of whom had fought the Reds in Ukraine’s 1917–21 civil war. He enrolled his children in Ukrainian language and culture classes, he and Vera became American citizens, and he legally changed his name to the quintessentially American “John.”
The Demjanjuks worshipped at St. Vladimir’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church, built in 1924 by Ukrainians who had fled Europe after the communist revolution. John served on its advisory board and his son became an altar boy. When “refugees” from Appalachia began flooding the old Ukrainian neighborhood in search of cheap housing and work, St. Vladimir’s parish fled to Parma, a southwestern suburb of Cleveland. The Demjanjuks followed their church.
In 1974, after more than twenty years of steady, hard work at Ford, the Demjanjuks could finally afford to buy their dream house—a brick ranch on Meadow Lane in Seven Hills, a typical Cleveland suburb of safe, tree-lined streets shading well-kept bungalows and houses, with bikes and roller skates on the front porch, and picnic tables and barbecue grills out back. The Demjanjuk home had a huge backyard, where John could do what he was born to do—grow things. He planted vegetables, trimmed his fruit trees, and tended the rosebushes.
To his neighbors, John Demjanjuk was a kind, quiet man, always willing to help a neighbor fix a lawn mower motor, as well as a hardworking provider, a dedicated Christian, a caring husband and father, and a true anticommunist patriot who had been wounded in battle, hung tough as a POW, and served the Ukrainian cause of independence.
John Demjanjuk was finally living the hard-won American dream.
That dream was shattered in 1977 when John Demjanjuk received a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice, charging him with fraudulently acquiring a U.S. visa in 1951 and illegally entering America the following year. That legal action ignited a war of words and deadly violence between Jews and emigres over three issues:
Was John Demjanjuk the victim of a Jewish witch hunt?
Did the Soviet Union set him up for a fall?
Did the United States, Israel, and Germany use him for political reasons?
The search for answers to those and other questions raised here begins with America’s pre–World War II immigration policy.
PART ONE
Opening the Door
CHAPTER ONE
By all standards of fairness, the U.S. record on World War II refugees is embarrassing for a country that prides itself on its generosity. Beginning with the Evian Conference in 1938 and culminating in the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, the United States was blatantly selfish, timid, callous, and discriminatory. It is a chapter of history that Americans would prefer to leave resting in the coffin of ancient history.
If the United States was slow to admit World War II refugees from Europe, it was a tortoise in the hunt to find and expel thousands of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators hiding among the 400,000–500,000 refugees it had been shamed into accepting. American sentiment was to “let sleeping Nazis lie” and the United States only entered the hunt, bickering and screaming, in the late 1970s—more than thirty years after the war. The reasons it took so long are clear: Most Americans couldn’t have cared less about a bunch of former Nazis as long as they behaved themselves; some felt that old Nazis were better than Jews; the U.S. government didn’t want to take time from the Cold War to smoke out former Nazis who were now loyal, contributing members of American society; and America had dark secrets to protect.
The first time the United States showed its hand in the refugee poker game was at the international, invitation-only conference in Evian-les-Bains, France, in the summer of 1938, six months before Kristallnacht, Hitler’s first major salvo in his war against Jews. More than 150,000 German Jews had anticipated the murder and mayhem of Kristallnacht and fled Germany in the vain hope of finding a home elsewhere. When Hitler annexed Austria (in the forcible union known as the Anschluss) in March 1938, another 200,000 Jews became either homeless or at risk.
Most of the wandering German and Austrian Jews wanted to settle in Palestine, but the British, who controlled that territory, had set a rigid quota. Great Britain was not about to turn Palestine into a dumping ground for European Jews whom other countries, including the United States, didn’t want. To do so would risk yet another Palestinian Arab uprising.
Chaim Weizmann, a Zionist who would later become the first president of Israel, parsed the Jewish problem with laser precision. In an address to an international refugee conference in London, he said: “The world seemed to be divided into two parts—those places where Jews could not live and those where they could not enter.”
All eyes were on America, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t relish the spotlight. Most Americans were nervous isolationists who didn’t want to be drawn into someone else’s war, and a good part of the working classes and WASP intellectuals were openly anti-Semitic. Roosevelt knew he had to do something. But what?
Ten days after the Anschluss, Roosevelt called for an international conference to address the growing refugee problem, which he foresaw was much larger than a few hundred thousand homeless Jews. France volunteered to host the meeting at Evian.
The call to action was more political than humanitarian. America was slowly emerging from the Great Depression and, although unemployment was gradually dipping, it still stood at a staggering 19 percent. Roosevelt found himself facing the twin pressures of isolationism and overt anti-Semitism. The latter had spiked in the 1930s with the advent of a string of anti-Semitic publications and the popular anti-Semitic radio addresses of Charles Coughlin, a Detroit Catholic priest. Father Coughlin had a following of more than forty million, and the Catholic hierarchy made no attempt to silence him.
Opinion polls at the time illustrate Roosevelt’s political dilemma. A 1938 American Institute of Public Opinion poll asked the following question: “Should we allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live?” Seventy-seven percent said no. Other polls reported that one-third of Americans thought the government should economically restrict Jews and one out of ten favored racially segregating Jews as well as deporting them. Many members of Congress and the State Department, including U.S. consulate officials who had great discretionary powers in granting visas, reflected the nation’s anti-Semitism. The Veterans of Foreign Wars opposed the Evian Conference and called for the end of
What was a president to do?
If he sought to admit more Jews into the country, Roosevelt knew he would be pouring gas on the embers of isolationism and anti-Semitism, thus running the risk of losing the upcoming presidential election. A consummate politician, Roosevelt called for a high-profile conference. It was a deft sleight of hand that would simultaneously make the United States appear humanitarian, offer a sop to Jewish voters, win applause from the majority of Americans for not caving in to international pressure, and discourage the unemployed from staging angry demonstrations. Roosevelt invited thirty-three other countries to Evian. Only Italy and South Africa declined.
