Demjanjuk had been a guard at Sobibor, not Treblinka. Information from America was always accurate, in her experience, and she didn’t have the slightest doubt that it might be wrong this time. Since Turowsky was emotionally shaken, Radiwker chose not to probe his memory, however gently. Instead she asked him to describe Iwan Grozny, as the INS had requested.
“He was of medium height, solidly built, with a round, full face,” Turowsky said. “He had a short broad neck, high forehead with the beginning of baldness… He could have been 23–24 years old at most.”
Turowsky did not work near the Treblinka gas chamber in camp two, but he saw Iwan almost daily as he passed from one camp to another. Given her witness’s emotional state, Radiwker decided to end the interview. “Mr. Turowsky,” she said, “we can talk about this more tomorrow.” Then she wrote up what Turowsky had told her, as the INS had requested. When Turowsky returned the next morning, she showed him the photo spread a second time.
“Look at the pictures,” she said. “Perhaps you will find someone you know.”
“The man in photograph seventeen is familiar to me,” Turowsky said. “This could be Fedorenko. I am almost certain of it, but I must comment that I always saw him in uniform and here he is in civilian clothes.”
The more he studied photo seventeen, the more certain Turowsky became. “This is Fedorenko. I am sure of this. I don’t remember his first name…. I saw him almost daily…. He was tall, about 180 cm [five feet, nine inches], age about 30, with broad shoulders….He committed crimes. He murdered Jews on his own.”
Radiwker added the new information to her report and offered it to Turowsky, who read and signed it. That afternoon, she placed the same three pages of photos on the table in front of Treblinka survivor Avraham Goldfarb.
“Please, sir. Look and see whether you find someone you know.”
Like Turowsky, Goldfarb picked out Demjanjuk as Iwan of Treblinka. But unlike Turowsky, he was not visibly agitated. He was certain the man in photo sixteen was Ivan the Terrible, he told Radiwker, because he worked only a few yards from the gas chamber and could see Iwan drive the prisoners into the chambers, then enter the building that housed the motors that delivered the lethal carbon monoxide gas.
“We workers called him Iwan Grozny,” Goldfarb said. “Ivan the Terrible.”
Either the information Zutty had given Radiwker was wrong or Goldfarb was wrong. Faced with the dilemma, Radiwker decided to probe. She pointed to photo sixteen, Demjanjuk.
“This man was at
Goldfarb was adamant. “When I came, he was already at Treblinka,” he said.
Next, Radiwker showed the photos to Eliyahu Rosenberg. Like Turowsky and Goldfarb before him, he pointed to photo sixteen, but was more cautious.
“The man in this photo,” he said, “is very similar to the Ukrainian Iwan who… was called Iwan Grozny.”
Without any prompting from Radiwker, Rosenberg went on to describe Iwan. “He had a round face, full…. He had a high forehead with the beginning of baldness. He also had very short hair. His neck was short, fat….I remember that he had prominent ears….He was 22–23 years old.”
Rosenberg hastened to add that he was not 100 percent sure. “I refuse to say that I identify him with certainty,” he said. “This photo apparently originates from a much later period. Here he is dressed in civilian clothes while I always saw him in… a black uniform.”
Rosenberg’s point was valid. Demjanjuk’s visa application photo was taken in 1951, eight years after the SS liquidated Treblinka.
Rosenberg then went on to positively identify Fedorenko as a guard at Treblinka. Once again, Radiwker decided to probe. According to the information she had, she told Rosenberg, the man in photo sixteen was a guard at Sobibor, not Treblinka.
“Madam, I know the face, and I am telling you he was at Treblinka,” Rosenberg replied. “In the course of 1942, several prisoners—construction workers—were sent to Sobibor together with some Ukrainians who did not return from there. However, I saw Ivan the Terrible until the last day.”
Radiwker concluded that the two positive (and one probable) identifications of Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible were hardly a coincidence. All three Treblinka survivors had based their identification on the same set of physical characteristics—round face, premature receding hairline, short bull neck, protruding ears, and age. There was some discrepancy on Iwan’s height. Was Demjanjuk Iwan Grozny, Radiwker asked herself, or did he just look like Iwan Grozny?
As requested, Radiwker sent the INS a report summarizing her interviews and presenting a concise description of each witness—age, state of mental and physical health, ability to travel, and willingness to testify in the United States. Then she went back to interviewing Treblinka and Sobibor survivors. Maybe she could solve the apparent contradiction.
Back in New York, Zutty couldn’t have been more pleased. All three Treblinka survivors had positively identified Fedorenko as a camp guard and a murderer. As far as eyewitnesses go, they were a category three,
Next, there were eyewitnesses who had neither known the alleged war criminal nor had seen him commit a crime. But they had witnessed local Nazi collaborators rounding up victims, brutalizing them, and, sometimes, killing them. These witnesses could testify that the organization the alleged collaborator belonged to habitually committed such war crimes.
Finally, there were eyewitnesses who both had known the alleged war criminal and had actually seen him commit crimes against humanity. The three Treblinka survivors fell into this category. They each had known Fedorenko as an SS auxiliary guard in uniform and armed with a gun. And they had witnessed him beating prisoners with whips and shooting them to death. Important to Zutty was that each eyewitness appeared—at least on paper—as convincing and credible, and each was specific about Fedorenko’s crimes. Who could ask for more?
The three Treblinka survivors, however, surprised Zutty as much as they had Radiwker. Each had paused at the visa photo of Iwan Demjanjuk. Each had pointed to it and said that he was Iwan the Terrible, the most hated and feared man at Treblinka. They had lived with his image in their heads every day for more than thirty years. How could they possibly be mistaken?
In August 1977, two years after the INS received the Ukrainian list, the U.S. attorney’s office in Cleveland filed the complaint:
At the same time, the U.S. attorney’s office in Fort Lauderdale filed a similar suit against Fedorenko, who had retired and moved to Florida; it alleged he had been a guard at Treblinka as well. Since the case against him was stronger, Fedorenko faced a judge first.
In July 1978, three years after the INS received the Ukrainian list, six Treblinka survivors confronted Fedorenko in a Florida courtroom. As the first alleged Nazi collaborator to be tried under the rules of the Displaced Persons Act (DPA), his trial turned out to be a watershed case that prepared the legal ground for the prosecution of John Demjanjuk.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Emotions erupted in the grassy courtyard outside the Fort Lauderdale courtroom as twenty-year-old Brett Becker, executive director of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in Miami, led a group of demonstrators in a chant.
“What do we want?” Becker shouted through a bullhorn.
“Fedorenko!” the crowd screamed back like “avenging cheerleaders,” as the
