Or was George thinking about me and my usefulness, about making me into his PR man? Maybe without me to intimidate with all that righteous rage, he was taking a quiet philosophical break and thinking to himself only this: Yes, it’s all a battle for TV time and column inches. Who controls the Nielsen ratings controls the world. It’s all publicity, a matter of which of us comes up with the more spectacular drama to popularize his claim. Treblinka is theirs, the uprising is ours — may the best propaganda machine win.
Or maybe he was thinking, wistfully, sinisterly, utterly realistically, If only we had the corpses. Yes, I thought, maybe it’s a pathologically desperate desire for bloody mayhem that lies behind this uprising, their need for a massacre, for piles of slaughtered corpses that will dramatize conclusively for worldwide TV just who are the victims this time round. Maybe that’s why the children are in the first wave, why, instead of fighting against the enemy with grown men, they are dispatching children, armed only with stones, to provoke the firepower of the Israeli army. Yes, to make the networks forget their Holocaust we will stage our Holocaust. On the bodies of our children the Jews will perpetrate a Holocaust, and at last the TV audience will understand our plight. Send in the children and then summon the networks — we’ll beat the Holocaust-mongers at their own game!
And what was I thinking? I was thinking, What are they thinking? I was thinking about Moishe Pipik and what he was thinking. And wondering every second where he was. Even as I continued to follow the courtroom proceedings I looked around me for some sign of his presence. I remembered the balcony. What if he was up with the journalists and the TV crews, sighting down on me from there?
I turned but from my seat could see nothing beyond the balcony railing. If he’s up there, I thought, he is thinking, What is Roth thinking? What is Roth doing? How do we kidnap the monster’s son if Roth is in the way?
There were uniformed policemen in the four corners of the courtroom and plainclothesmen, with walkie-talkies, standing at the back of the courtroom and regularly moving up and down the aisles — shouldn’t I get hold of one and take him with me up to the balcony to apprehend Moishe Pipik? But Pipik’s gone, I thought, it’s over.…
This is what I was thinking when I was not thinking the opposite and everything else.
As to what the accused was thinking while Rosenberg explained to the court why the Treblinka memoir was erroneous, the person who best knew that sat at the defense table, the Israeli lawyer, Sheftel, to whom Demjanjuk had been passing note after note throughout Chumak’s examination of Rosenberg, notes written, I supposed, in the defendant’s weak English. Demjanjuk scribbled feverishly away, but after he’d passed each note to Sheftel over the lawyer’s shoulder, it did not look to me as though Sheftel gave more than a cursory glance to it before setting it down atop the others on the table[1]. In the Ukrainian American community, I was thinking, these notes, if they were ever to be collected and published, would have an impact on Demjanjuk’s landsmen something like that of those famous prison letters written in immigrantese by Sacco and Vanzetti. Or the impact on the conscience of the civilized world that Supposnik immoderately posits for Klinghoffer’s travel diaries should they ever be graced by an introduction by me.
All this writing by nonwriters, I thought, all these diaries, memoirs, and notes written clumsily with the most minimal skill, employing one one-thousandth of the resources of a written language, and yet the testimony they bear is no less persuasive for that, is in fact that much more searing precisely because the expressive powers are so blunt and primitive.
Chumak was now asking Rosenberg, “So how can you possibly come to this court and point your finger at this gentleman when you wrote in 1945 that Ivan was killed by Gustav?”
“Mr. Chumak,” he quickly replied, “did I say that I saw him kill him?”
“Don’t answer with another question,” Justice Levin cautioned Rosenberg.
“He didn’t come back from the dead, Mr. Rosenberg,” Chumak continued.
“I did not say so. I did not say so. I personally did not say that I saw him being killed,” said Rosenberg. “But, Mr. Chumak, I would like to see him — I did not — but I did not see him. It was my fondest wish. I was in Paradise when I heard — not only Gustav but also others told me — I wanted, I wanted to believe, Mr. Chumak. I wanted to believe that this creature does not exist. Is not alive any longer. But, unfortunately, to my great sorrow, I would have liked to see him torn apart as he had torn apart our people. And I believed with all my heart that he had been liquidated. Can you understand, Mr. Chumak? It was their fondest wish. It was our dream to finish him off, together with others. But he had managed to get out, get away, survive — what luck he had!”
“Sir, you wrote in your handwriting, in Yiddish — not in German, not in Polish, not in English, but in your own language — you wrote that he was hit on the head by Gustav with a spade, leaving him lying there for keeps. You wrote that. And you told us that you wrote the truth when you made these statements in 1945. Are you saying that’s not true?”
“No, it is true, this is the truth what it says here — but what the boys told us was not the truth. They wanted to boast. They were lending expression to their dream. They aspired to, their fondest wish was, to kill this person — but they hadn’t.”
“Why didn’t you write then,” Chumak asked him, “it was the boys’ fondest wish to kill this man and I heard later in the forest that he was killed in such and such a way — or in another way. Why didn’t you write it all down, all these versions?”
Rosenberg replied, “I preferred to write this particular version.”
“Who was present with you when this version was given, this version about the boys wanting to kill him, and everyone wanting to be a hero, and killing this awful man?”
“In the forest, when they told this version there were a great many around, and we sat around for some hours before we went our own way. And there, sir, they were sitting down and each was telling his version and I took it in. And this is what I remember, I took this in and I really wanted to believe firmly that this is what had happened. But it had not come about.”
When I looked at Demjanjuk I saw him smiling directly back, not at me, of course, but at his loyal son, seated in the chair in front of me. Demjanjuk was amused by the absurdity of the testimony, tremendously amused by it, even triumphant-looking because of it, as though Rosenberg’s claim that he had reported accurately in 1945 what his sources, unbeknownst to him, had themselves reported inaccurately was all the exculpation necessary and he was as good as free. Was he dim-witted enough to believe that? Why was he smiling? To raise the spirits of his son and supporters? To register for the audience his contempt? The smile was eerie and mystifying and, to Rosenberg, as anyone could see, as odious as the hand of friendship and the warm “Shalom” that had been tendered him by Demjanjuk the year before. Had Rosenberg’s hatred been combustible and had a match been struck anywhere near the witness stand, the entire courtroom would have gone up in flames. Rosenberg’s dockworker’s fingers bit into the lectern and his jaw was locked as though to suppress a roar.
“Now,” Chumak continued, “based on the Version’ as you now call it, this version of Ivan being killed, he was struck in the head with a spade. Would you therefore expect, sir, the man who was struck with the spade to have a scar or a fractured skull or some serious injury to his head? If that happened to Ivan in the engine room?”
1
It was Sheftel, by the way, who would have benefited from a bodyguard to protect him against attack. Perhaps my most unthinking mistake of all in Jerusalem was to have allowed myself to become convinced that at the culmination of this inflammatory trial, the violent rage of a wild Jewish avenger, if and when it should erupt, would be directed at a Gentile and not, as I initially thought, and as happened — and as even the least cynical of Jewish ironists could have foreseen — at another Jew.
On December 1, 1988, during the funeral for Demjanjuk’s auxiliary Israeli lawyer — one who’d joined Sheftel, after Demjanjuk’s conviction, to help prepare the Supreme Court appeal and who mysteriously committed suicide only weeks later — Sheftel was approached by Yisroel Yehezkeli, a seventy-year-old Holocaust survivor and a frequent spectator at the Demjanjuk trial, who shouted at him, “Everything’s because of you,” and threw hydrochloric acid in the lawyer’s face. The acid completely destroyed the protective cover over the cornea of his left eye and Sheftel was virtually blind in that eye until he came to Boston some eight weeks later, where he underwent a cell transplant, a four-hour operation by a Harvard surgeon, that restored his sight. During Sheftel’s Boston sojourn and subsequent recovery, he was accompanied by John Demjanjuk, Jr., who acted as his nurse and chauffeur.
As for Yisroel Yehezkeli, he was convicted of aggravated assault. He was sentenced by a Jerusalem judge, who found him “unrepentant,” and served three years in jail. The court psychiatrist’s report described the assailant as “not psychotic, although slightly paranoid.” Most of Yehezkeli’s family had been killed at Treblinka.