Word: treblinka
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bald, bull-necked man in the dock sat impassively at the edge of his chair listening intently. Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk, 66, a retired Ohio auto mechanic, was on trial in Jerusalem for operating gas chambers and murdering and torturing victims at Treblinka, the infamous Nazi extermination camp in eastern Poland where at least 850,000 Jews were killed in 1942 and '43. It was Israel's first war-crimes trial since Adolf Eichmann was convicted and executed a quarter-century ago. At issue, however, was not the horrors committed at Treblinka by the Ukrainian guard known as "Ivan...
Prosecutor Michael Shaked presented an altogether different story about Demjanjuk's past. From the POW camp in Chelm, Shaked maintains, Demjanjuk was transferred to Trawniki, an SS center used for training guards to work in the concentration camps, and then to Treblinka, where he served between October 1942 and September 1943. The prosecution's primary exhibit is ID card 1393, made out in Demjanjuk's name and supposedly issued at the Trawniki training center. The defense contends that the card is a forgery by the Soviet KGB as part of an effort to harass the Ukrainian community...
...case is further complicated by uncertainty about the fate of the real- life "Ivan." Three of Treblinka's 100 or more Ukrainian guards were killed in an abortive uprising at the camp in August 1943. Several escapees, including the late Avraham Goldfarb, have said that Ivan was among them. Last week, however, Prosecution Witness Yitzhak Arad, the director of Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, testified that Goldfarb had not seen Ivan's body and that he himself had been unable to verify Ivan's death...
...heart of the case, as it unfolds before a three-judge tribunal in a converted movie theater in Jerusalem, is the reliability of human memory. Photographs, maps and records were all burned by the Germans after they razed Treblinka in late 1943. As many as a dozen survivors of Treblinka have previously been unable to identify Demjanjuk as Ivan from photographs. Nonetheless, the prosecution says, it will present five of the camp's survivors who are prepared to identify John Demjanjuk as the demonic killer. The first of these eyewitnesses is expected to testify this week...
Another crucial piece of evidence is an i.d. card allegedly labelling Demjanjuk as a member of an elite Ukranian POW group that was trained by the Nazi SS as prison guards for Treblinka. The card, which includes a photo and personal data, is especially important because the Germans destroyed all Treblinka records when they abandoned the site...