Treblinka had dark hair, not blond, as the Trawniki card described Demjanjuk’s hair.
Next, the government called five Treblinka survivors in a row to testify that John Demjanjuk was the Ivan the Terrible they saw and feared. For spectators, it was the high point of the trial and they flocked to the courthouse door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The crowd in the courthouse lobby on the morning the first Treblinka survivor was scheduled to testify was unruly. There was pushing and shoving as spectators jostled to get closer to the metal detector, the gateway to a seat in the courtroom or gallery. Under these conditions, it was impossible for the marshals to create anything that resembled an orderly line. A news release issued by a Ukrainian group suggesting that Holocaust survivors had become “psychotic with revenge and hate” did not help to defuse a potentially explosive situation.
The prosecution called Chiel Rajchman to the stand. Then living in Montevideo, Uruguay, Rajchman was born in Poland, captured by the Nazis in 1942, and sent to Treblinka along with his sister. The SS selected him to sort clothes. They sent her to the gas chamber. On his second day in the camp, Rajchman found her dress in the pile of clothes he was sorting. He cut a piece of it when no one was looking and treasured it like a photograph until the day he escaped.
The SS took Rajchman off the sorting line after a few days and made him a “barber.” His new job was to cut off the hair of naked women and girls, their last stop before being driven down the camouflaged path that the SS called the “Road to Heaven.” It was a wrenching, stressful job. He had to remove a woman’s hair in five quick cuts and drop the locks into a valise. Six cuts and he would join her in the gas chamber.
Next, Rajchman worked for Otto Horn in camp two. He pulled bodies from the gas chambers, loaded them onto large wheelbarrows without sides, and raced them to the pits. If he didn’t move fast enough, the Germans or Trawniki men who worked around the gas chambers would beat him, like the guards beat the slave miners in Camp Dora.
When Rajchman arrived at the long, deep pit, he would slide the corpse(s) off the wheelbarrow into the hole, where groups of Jews waited to stack them head to toe. When the pit was filled, they covered the bodies with sand and chlorine. In February 1943, as the Red Army pushed west, Himmler ordered the bodies to be dug up and burned to destroy the evidence.
Toting corpses was so traumatic that many prisoners assigned to the gruesome task hung themselves by their belts. Rajchman told the court that he wanted to hang himself, too, but he couldn’t do it. Instead, he asked the chief dentist, who pulled gold teeth from the dead, for some poison. The dentist got him a job as his assistant.
Pulling teeth was a lot easier than carting victims, some of whom were still breathing. When there were no transports, Rajchman cleaned blood, flesh, and bone from the teeth. Then he separated the gold teeth from those with other metals and polished them until they gleamed.
Long before the trial began, Rajchman had identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible from the two legally correct OSI photo spreads. Since he worked next to the gas chambers, Rajchman had had a chance to observe Ivan at work. He recalled him as armed with a both a rifle and a pistol. For a Trawniki man who was not a
Horrigan conducted the direct examination of Rajchman. His job was to get the witness to identify Iwan as an exceptionally cruel guard, and then identify Demjanjuk as Iwan.
“Do you recall the names of any Ukrainians in camp two?” Horrigan asked.
“I remember them well,” Rajchman said. “The biggest devil, who engraved himself in my memory… was called Iwan. His assistant was called Nikolai.”
After he testified that he saw Iwan herd victims into the gas chamber buildings before Iwan himself entered, Rajchman went on to describe some of the atrocities he saw Iwan commit. One day, Iwan picked up an auger and walked over to a Jew. He ordered the man to bend over, Rajchman testified, then he began drilling into the prisoner’s buttocks. When the man began crying from pain, Iwan laughed and said if he screamed, he’d kill him.
Soon after escaping from Treblinka and while in hiding, Rajchman began a diary. Horrigan asked him to read out loud what he had written in it about Iwan thirty-eight years earlier. The courtroom listened in stunned silence.
“He gets a sharp knife. When a worker runs by, he cuts off an ear. Blood spurts out but he had to run on with the carrier (litter for corpses). Iwan waits until he runs back then tells him to get into the pit where he (Iwan) shoots him.”
Horrigan showed Rajchman the two OSI photo spreads. From both the visa photo and the Trawniki card photo, he identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. Vera collapsed. An ambulance took her to St. Vincent Charity Hospital, where she was treated for hysteria. She would not return to the courtroom for a week.
Martin’s job was to cast doubt that the man Rajchman positively identified as Ivan the Terrible was the John Demjanjuk sitting a few feet from him. Martin couldn’t attack the OSI photo spreads, since they were legally correct. But he could zero in on two physical characteristics in Rajchman’s description of Ivan the Terrible that did not match Demjanjuk—height and hair color. Rajchman’s answers were cagey.
“How tall was he?” Martin asked.
Rajchman pointed to Martin and said to Judge Battisti, “Taller than him.”
“About how much did he weigh?”
“I never weighed him.”
The courtroom burst into laughter.
“Could you give us your best estimate?”
“How can I know what he weighed?” Rajchman said. “I know he was strong like a horse. He carried a long pipe and he split people’s heads with it. That I know.”
“What color was his hair?”
“Not light.”
“Was it dark or black?”
“Possibly dark,” Rajchman said.
“What were his facial features?”
“I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Let me help you,” Battisti said. “Elongated? Was it elongated or long?”
“It’s possible sort of elongated.”
Demjanjuk’s face was oval.
The prosecution called Eliyahu Rosenberg to the stand.
Like Rajchman, Rosenberg was born in Poland, rounded up in the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers and Trawniki men, and taken to Treblinka. Like Rajchman, he carted dead bodies to the pit for several weeks. Like Rajchman, he testified against Otto Horn at the Dusseldorf Treblinka trial. And like Rajchman, he lost relatives at Treblinka. His mother and father were gassed there, and on the very day he arrived at the camp, he pulled a cousin out of the gas chamber with his own hands.
Rosenberg had identified Demjanjuk, but not positively, as Ivan the Terrible from the photo spread Miriam Radiwker had shown him in Israel, the spread that Judge Roettger had called so badly flawed that it could not “pass muster.”
There were two buildings at Treblinka that housed gas chambers, Rosenberg told the court. The smaller of the two had three chambers, which were antiquated and no longer in use. The larger had ten, two rows with five
