Old Nazis in a New Israel: a Trial Gnaws at a Nation

Last week John Demjanjuk, formerly of Cleveland, stepped off an El Al jet in Israel and into the glare of the whirling blue lights of police vans waiting on the tarmac. Demjanjuk is the first Nazi war criminal ever to be extradited to Israel. And he will be the first Nazi tried there since Adolph Eichmann, the mastermind of the Final Solution who was kidnaped from Argentina, tried and executed in 1962.

But Demjanjuk’s trial will be more than a historic landmark. A nation founded by Holocaust survivors in 1948 as the fulfillment of a divine covenant must now face a question of considerable complexity: Does the Holocaust remain at the core of Israel’s existence 41 years later, or has it become a venerated memory, slowly passing into history with the death of its survivors?

There are few Nazi criminals alive today whose trial could give Israel so stark an occasion to confront such questions. Demjanjuk’s contribution to genocide took place at the Treblinka death camp in Poland, where trainloads of Jews arrived from Warsaw. “Guards” with lead-tipped whips herded them naked and shaven into an airtight concrete bunker from which a rubber hose ran to the diesel engine of a captured Russian tank. When the bunker was jammed tight with victims, a man named Ivan started the engine and pumped carbon monoxide into the bunker until everyone was dead.

The “work-Jews” at Treblinka who were made to pull the gold from the victims’ teeth or carry the corpses to the burning pits knew this beefy Ukrainian only as “Ivan the Terrible,” but he did his murderous work well. Of the 1,200,000 Jews who were driven off the trains at Treblinka, the number who lived to tell of it was fewer than 50.

Ivan Demjanjuk, posing as a refugee, came to the United States in 1951, changed his name to John and began a 34-year career on the assembly line of Ford Motor Co. When the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations went to trial in 1951 to revoke Demjanjuk’s citizenship, five Treblinka survivors identified his immigration photograph as Ivan the Terrible.

A captured German ID card from the Trawniki training camp, where Treblinka “guards” were taught how to kill people en masse, showed the same man with the same name and date and place of birth as the man from Cleveland.

Demjanjuk’s citizenship was revoked and he was ordered deported. On Feb. 24 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Israel’s extradition request, and Demjanjuk was dispatched to Ben Gurion airport.

But Israel today is a society vastly different from what it was when Eichmann was tried. Then the Holocaust was still a relatively recent and hideous event in the life of every adult citizen. Israel itself was a nation still preoccupied with an uncertain survival. Hostile forces occupied lands within artillery range of Jerusalem, which was divided into Arab and Israeli sectors. It was a land besieged, as the Jews had been 20 years before, and few Israelis needed to be reminded of the parallels, or of what Eichmann had done.

Nearly a quarter-century later, Holocaust survivors are growing old, and many of them fear that for the generation under 40 the cataclysmic event has become remote. Many Israelis, young and old, are uncomfortable with the occupation of southern Lebanon and wonder aloud whether the nation created to protect Jews from aggression has itself become the aggressor. Triple-digit inflation, heavy military spending and the proliferation of ultra-orthodox religious parties have produced chronic and often divisive political stalemate. Depressed birthrates for Jews, dwindling immigration and emigration to the West have kept the Jewish population steady while Arabs in occupied territories multiply; some fear that the day will come when Jews will be a minority in the land of Zion.

In this land, in this time, Demjanjuk’s trial is certain to dominate the press. Grim news always does. There are no films, no photographs of Treblinka. As evidence, the prosecutors might use instead the testimony of the late commandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl, spoken at his 1971 trial in Germany: “It was Dante’s Inferno. It was Dante come to life. The smell was indescribable: the hundreds--no, the thousands--of bodies everywhere, decomposing, putrifying.” The testimony of the survivors will resonate, as it did in Cleveland: “Many were killed. Many remained hanging on the barbed wire. My fate was to remain alive.”

It has been a long time since words with such power to repel and ennoble have been heard in the land founded by those whose fate was to remain alive.

The trial of Ivan Demjanjuk may serve, in a nation beset with conflict and doubt, more than the cause of justice. By forcing their attention on a place known long ago as Treblinka, it may restore to the people of Israel something that they had in 1962: a forceful common identity, a reiteration of who they are and why they are there. What this stern vision might mean for Israeli policy at home and abroad is something that the world would do well to mark.