Useful Enemies

Court the word that Iwan said.”

Epstein paused, once again biting back tears.

“‘ Come fuck!’ And Djoubas mounted this child,” Epstein said. “They took the girl to where they took all the corpses and shot her. I would find difficulty in comparing Iwan even to an animal, because I know that an animal, if sated, does not attack…. Iwan was never sated. He would prey every day, every moment… a monster from another planet.”

Epstein went on to describe how the gruesome work of taking corpses from the gas chambers affected the Jews forced to do it. “There wasn’t a night that someone didn’t hang himself,” he told the court. “It was mostly people who the day before had recognized a wife, father, or relative among the dead they cleared out of the gas chamber.”

Epstein pointed at Demjanjuk sitting barely seventy feet away. “He’s sitting here!” he cried, pounding the podium with his fists to applause from the gallery. “I dream about him every single night…. He is etched in me. In my memory. Every night. I cannot free myself…. This is the man…. I remember him. I see him, I see him, I see him!”

Epstein apologized to the court for his outburst.

• • •

Eliyahu Rosenberg, who had carried corpses to the burying pits, testified: “There was a thick, viscous material, almost like lava from a volcano, which bubbled on the top of the pits. The earth would rise and then subside. As it fell, we would be ordered to throw in another layer of bodies.”

He described how a group of Jewish children ran naked into a gas chamber one winter day to escape the subzero weather. “They saw a door and ran in just to get out of the cold.”

He recalled how an SS guard saved his life. Iwan had ordered him to have intercourse with a dead woman. In panic, he ran toward Iwan’s boss, SS Sergeant Fritz Schmidt, and told him what Iwan said. Rosenberg couldn’t do it. He’d rather die. “I’ll deal with Iwan,” Schmidt said. And he did. Rosenberg lived. Saved by a Nazi.

He told the court how Iwan once gave him thirty lashes for stealing bread and made him count the lashes out loud. After each, he had to say “thank you.”

He told the court that the designer of the gas chamber placed a window in the door so an observer could watch the Jews die. The window was useless because the breaths of the dying fogged it up.

He described what death sounded like outside the chambers: “Suddenly the engine began making a loud noise and terrible screams were emitted from the gas chambers. ‘Mama, Tatta, Shma Israel [Hear, Oh Israel], Ruchaleh, Moshe.’ And the walls trembled. And we outside trembled, too. At long last, it subsided, and I could hear the moaning of the people, and then slowly—ever so slowly—it died out.”

Rosenberg used Yiddish when he recalled what Schmidt said: “Ale shluft.” They’re all asleep.

The courtroom grew quiet and tense when a prosecutor showed Miriam Radiwker’s photo spread to Rosenberg. He identified photo sixteen as that of Iwan Grozny. “You told Mrs. Radiwker if you saw Iwan alive,” the prosecutor reminded him, “you would recognize him.”

“I request that the honorable court order him to take off his glasses,” Rosenberg said.

“His glasses,” Judge Levin said. “Why?”

“I want to see his eyes.”

O’Connor objected, then he approached the bench. After a brief word with Judge Levin, O’Connor agreed to Rosenberg’s request. “My client has nothing to hide.”

Demjanjuk took off his glasses and stood. Pointing to a spot right in front of him, Demjanjuk said: “Mr. Rosenberg, would you please approach? Right here.”

Rosenberg left the witness stand and quickly walked over to Demjanjuk, never taking his eyes off him, while spectators shouted, “Murderer… to the gallows!”

Six feet tall and standing on a platform, Demjanjuk towered over Rosenberg.

“Look at me!” Rosenberg demanded.

The courtroom was quiet now as spectators watched, frozen in anticipation and shock. No one coughed or stirred.

Demjanjuk smiled and met Rosenberg’s stare. Then he offered Rosenberg his hand and said, “Shalom!”

Rosenberg stumbled backward into the arms of the guards. “Murderer!” he cried out with clenched fists. “How dare you put your hand out to me!”

Rosenberg’s wife, who was seated in the third row, screamed and fainted into the arms of her daughter. The police carried her out while bailiffs led Rosenberg back to the witness stand, where he rested his head on the podium. There was so much shouting and screaming in the courtroom that it looked as if the session was over. After repeated tries, Judge Levin restored order.

“You were asked to come close,” Judge Levin said to Rosenberg. “You stopped and looked. What is your answer?”

Rosenberg gripped the witness stand and yelled:

“This is Iwan. I say so without hesitation and without a shadow of a doubt. It is Iwan from the gas chambers, the man I am looking at now. I saw his eyes. I saw those merderische oygen!” Those murderous eyes!

After he calmed down, Rosenberg said in a philosophical tone, “He who has been in Treblinka will never get out. He who has not been there will never get there.”

• • •

Mark O’Connor and John Gill got stuck with the delicate and thankless job of questioning the Treblinka survivors. Sheftel didn’t have the stomach for it. “No way will I cross-examine survivors of Treblinka,” he had told O’Connor before he agreed to serve as co-counsel. “I can’t.” Eventually, he agreed to question them only on police procedures used in the identification process.

O’Connor and Gill believed the survivors’ stories about Ivan the Terrible and were deeply moved by their suffering. But both attorneys were convinced that the survivors were pointing their collective finger at the wrong man. The defense’s job was to cast doubt on the reliability of their memories. Unlike Judge Roettger’s examination, O’Connor and Gill were gentle but grueling.

At one point during his questioning of Sonia Lewkowicz, who did the laundry in a building near the gas chambers, in order to test her memory Gill asked where she hung up the guards’ shirts and socks to dry.

Judge Levin lost his cool. “Is it important to know where they hung up the laundry?” he asked. “There is a limit to what you can ask. What is the difference where the laundry was hung when 850,000 human beings were killed at Treblinka?”

At another point, O’Connor asked Rosenberg: “Wasn’t there anything you could have done?” suggesting that he was himself collaborating with the Nazis.

“How could I have helped them?” Rosenberg said. “By screaming? They would have shoved me straight into the pit of blood. Don’t ask me questions like that, I beg you. You weren’t there…. I’ve never been asked such a terrible question. Not even by the worst anti-Semites.”

Rosenberg then pointed at Demjanjuk. “Ask him what would have happened to me!”

Judge Levin noticed that Demjanjuk had muttered something in response to Rosenberg’s outburst. He asked O’Connor what his client had said. O’Connor huddled with Demjanjuk.

“He said,” O’Connor replied, “‘You’re a liar.’”

Rosenberg had written in his 1945 diary, two years after his escape from Treblinka, that Iwan Grozny died during the August uprising.

“How can you possibly come to this court,” O’Connor demanded none too gently, “and point the finger at this gentleman when you wrote in 1945 that he was killed? He didn’t come back from the dead, Mr. Rosenberg.”

Even Demjanjuk laughed.

Rosenberg sat in a chair behind the witness stand with his arms defiantly crossed in front of his chest.

“I didn’t see him dead,” he said. “Others told me.”

• • •

Sheftel thought O’Connor’s cross-examination of the Treblinka witnesses was pathetic. Instead of testing their memories on nonemotional issues, he spent too much time grilling them about the shocking details of what they said they saw and experienced. In the end, O’Connor accomplished nothing but to upset the witnesses, further