Word: demjanjuk
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...unusual is that in this holiday season, no fewer than three Hollywood films deal with the Holocaust. Triumph of the Spirit tells the true tale of a Greek-Jewish boxer, Salamo Arouch, who literally fights for his life at Auschwitz. Music Box fictionalizes the 1988 trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant to the U.S. who was convicted of war crimes. And Enemies, a Love Story adapts Isaac Bashevis Singer's 1966 novel about Holocaust survivors sorting out their guilt and their passions in postwar New York City. Still, for all their ambitions, this trio ends up as two honorable...
...Demjanjuk's lawyers (one who mysteriously fell to his death from a 15-story building, the other who had acid thrown in his face) complained throughout the trial that the OSI was witholding other key statements from two Treblinka guards widely presumed to have stated that Demjanjuk was not Ivan...
Unless both of these things occur, Israel's Supreme Court should grant Demjanjuk's appeal--regardless of how unpopular such a decision might be among Israelis, hundreds of whom crammed the movie-theater-turned-courtroom last May to applaud Demjanjuk's death sentence and rhythmically chant, "Death, death, death...The people of Israel live...
Unquestionably, Nazi war criminals should be brought to justice. However, while Demjanjuk may be Ivan, after 40 years and a great deal of conflicting testimony there is certainly room for reasonable doubt--enough doubt for Demjanjuk's death sentence to be overturned...
Indeed, if he is hung without the suppressed testimonies and files being brought to light, Demjanjuk may ultimately go down in history not as Ivan the Terrible, but, as Patrick Buchanan puts it, "the victim of a greater miscarriage of justice than Alfred Dreyfus...