[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  Black knew that the ghetto had been nearly emptied in March 1942, when fifteen hundred people a day were forced from a gathering point at the oldest synagogue in Lublin onto freight trains that were waiting at a station just outside the ghetto. Though the Jews of Lublin didn’t know it, they would be taken 130 kilometers southeast to the railway station in Belzec. It had been the first killing center constructed under Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan to murder the Jews in the Government General.

  At Belzec, signs in German, Polish, and Yiddish read: Please undress. Go the bath area. Shower. Relax on the straw. Struck by whips and rifle butts, the stunned prisoners were forced along a narrow pathway from the barracks into a gas chamber that would soon fill with exhaust fumes from a diesel engine.

  Black left the area and moved along to the Lublin neighborhood where, in 1939, SS leaders had commandeered a middle school painted buttercup yellow and soon began to craft plans for mass murder. The man in charge was Odilo Globocnik, a one-time hothead in the Austrian Nazi Party who had enjoyed the confidence of top Nazi officials, including Heinrich Himmler, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, and Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of security police and a top deputy to Himmler.

  Lublin was a blood-stained city, and during Black’s second week on the road, with three more left, he wanted to call Mary at home in Virginia. From behind the Iron Curtain, that meant waiting by the phone for a day or more with no guarantee of a connection. Black missed his wife and young son, Aaron, who had said a few words when he was a year old and then stopped talking altogether.

  “Kids develop in different ways,” David Marwell offered when Black mentioned that Aaron had been diagnosed with developmental delays. “They have their own timelines.”

  Black had always been a bit of a worrier. He had fretted about American engagement in Southeast Asia and about the pushback against civil and equal rights at home. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, Black worried about a country that seemed bound to become less tolerant, which affected not only his sense of morality but also his family since Aaron would one day rely on federal law that banned discrimination against people with disabilities.

  What kind of world, Black wondered, would his young son inherit?

  LUBLIN WAS FRIGID and night came early, but Black needed every bit of three weeks to finish his research. Early each morning, he trudged to the archives on streets covered with ice and mud and settled in for a long afternoon of reading, working through lunch so that he didn’t lose time.

  One afternoon, Black was studying an inventory of records, making notes about the files he wanted to review. He stopped on one of the entries: Trawniki.

  There it was again.

  Black thought of the men found on US soil. Though OSI had opted not to file cases against Jakob Reimer or Vladas Zajanckauskas, Feodor Fedorenko had been ordered deported to the Soviet Union. Liudas Kairys was facing the loss of US citizenship, and Israel had issued an extradition request for John Demjanjuk, identified as “Ivan the Terrible” of the Treblinka killing center.

  In each of the three cases, the training camp at Trawniki had been a supporting fact, an essential tool linking the men to Treblinka. In the Demjanjuk and Kairys cases, service at Trawniki had even been part of the allegations filed in court by OSI. But the focus of the prosecution was largely on the Treblinka killing center and forced-labor camp, where daily horrors had been documented by scholars worldwide.

  Black wanted more information about the operation and scope of Trawniki, particularly in the case against John Demjanjuk. Black was a documents man, and something didn’t fit.

  Holocaust survivors had placed Demjanjuk at the gas chambers of Treblinka, but Black had studied Demjanjuk’s SS-issued identification card, with a picture of the twenty-three-year-old ethnic Ukrainian dressed in an earth-brown uniform, his identification number—1393—pinned just above the gold button on his breast pocket. Two work assignments were recorded near the bottom of the card, one in September 1942 at a so-called SS and police estate about two dozen kilometers east of Lublin, and a second at the Sobibor killing center in March 1943.

  There was no reference to Treblinka.

  On a flight to Chicago to interview a witness in another case, Black mentioned the discrepancy to OSI lawyer Bruce Einhorn. The son of a chemist, Einhorn often ate his tuna-salad sandwich in the historians’ offices at lunch, chatting about cases that he couldn’t bring himself to discuss at home. Sharing the awful details with his wife, Einhorn had concluded, would be like passing along the flu.

  When early-morning fog diverted the flight from Chicago to Detroit, Black leaned over in his seat. “How do you reconcile what these witnesses say and what stands on the document?”

  “The witness testimony is very, very strong,” Einhorn had replied.

  But Black knew that human memory could be frail, distorted within minutes of an experience or shaken and changed by the passage of time. Black also knew that no historian had been heavily involved in the Demjanjuk investigation, which had been launched before the Office of Special Investigations was established.

  Later, Black decided to approach historian Charlie Sydnor, who had agreed at the conference in Charleston to work with OSI as an expert witness. “How do we explain the discrepancy between the card and the survivors?” Black asked.

  Sydnor shrugged, impressed by Black’s persistence. Ruthless objectivity, Sydnor would come to call it.

  “If this man is not Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka,” the older historian said in a Southern drawl, “if all these survivors are wrong, then he’s Ivan the slightly less terrible of Sobibor. So who really gives a shit?”

  Clearly, Demjanjuk was not an innocent man. Though OSI had no documentary evidence establishing that he had served at Treblinka, Demjanjuk’s identification card placed him at the killing center Sobibor, where at least 167,000 Jews had perished.

  Still, a finding of guilt based on faulty or missing facts would compromise the credibility of the legal case and the ongoing work at the Office of Special Investigations.

  Black hoped to get the details straight for the record of history and to establish, unequivocally, where and how Demjanjuk had served the Reich. Too many questions lingered.

  One came from a stamp on the back of Demjanjuk’s identification card:

  Dienstsitz Lublin

  Ausbildungslager Trawniki

  Service Location Lublin. Trawniki Training Camp.

  What had happened there, on the site of an abandoned sugar factory that long before the war had delivered a living wage to Polish families? What had brought together five strangers—Kairys and Zajanckauskas from Lithuania, Demjanjuk and Reimer from the Soviet Ukraine, and Fedorenko from the Sivash region of Crimea—to the exact same place as the Germans launched the deadliest part of the Holocaust?

  Sitting in the archives of Lublin, not far from Trawniki, Black asked to see all the files on the training camp. The director nodded and sent his archivist to search for the records. He returned some time later, shaking his head. The Trawniki files had been sent to another archive in Poland. He did not say where.

  In the matter of Trawniki, Black would go home empty-handed after all. But OSI in 1984 had no active Trawniki case, and Black had plenty of other work to do in Lublin.

  Chapter Seven

  Breach of Power

  Washington, D.C.

  1987

  Just before Easter on a breezy night in Washington, OSI director Neal Sher sat alone at his desk, thinking about the dozens of Nazi war criminals pursued by the Office of Special Investigations over eight years and the single, high-profile case that could permanently undermine the operation.

  The place was empty. The lawyers and historians had long wrapped up for the day, and Sher was grateful for the time alone. He had a decision to make.

  One wrong move and it could all be over, the Office of Special Investigations shut down long before the work was done. For OSI’s newest leader, it was an intolerable thought, given that
Peter Black and the historians were poring over thousands of Nazi records from Warsaw, Lublin, West Berlin, and Israel, and OSI prosecutors were scrambling to remove Nazi perpetrators who had been found in nearly every corner of the United States.

  One of them was a sixty-seven-year-old land surveyor in Long Island.

  In 1981, a federal court had stripped Karl Linnas of his citizenship after OSI found that he was once the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp in Soviet Estonia, where women and children had been bound by their hands, forced to kneel at the edge of a ditch, and shot by a firing squad. After Linnas appealed the ruling, Sher had asked Rudolph W. Giuliani, the US attorney in Manhattan, to argue the case on appeal before the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

  Sher had read the court’s damning assessment so often that he had committed key passages to memory: “Karl Linnas’ appeal to humanity, a humanity which he has grossly, callously and monstrously offended, truly offends this court’s sense of decency.”

  Linnas was ordered deported to his native Soviet Estonia, where a court in 1962 had tried him in absentia and found him a traitor and a murderer. But an alliance of Eastern European émigré groups had rallied to block the deportation, arguing that no one in the United States should be delivered into the hands of the Soviet government, a totalitarian regime responsible for the deaths of millions.

  The groups secured a powerful ally with ties to the White House, Patrick Buchanan, who weeks earlier had reached out to the attorney general of the United States. Buchanan’s intervention seemed outrageous to Sher, a significant breach of power by a man who had just stepped down as the director of communications for President Ronald Reagan. For years, Sher had scoffed when Buchanan criticized OSI, lambasting the unit for “running down 70-year-old camp guards.”

  “If not now, when?” former OSI director Allan Ryan had regularly shot back.

  Ryan had gone on to become an attorney for Harvard University, passing the reins of the unit to Sher, a thirty-nine-year-old OSI prosecutor who had listened to an avalanche of confessions, denials, regrets, and excuses, elderly witnesses who bowed their heads and cried, “Those poor Jews,” survivors who brought their children to interviews because they could only bear to tell their stories one time before they died.

  Both Ryan and Sher had tried to keep the politics of Nazi hunting away from the unit’s twenty-three lawyers and historians, fearing that constant threats about OSI’s demise would distract from necessary investigations. Most of the threats had been little more than rhetoric, but in the Linnas case rhetoric had grown into something far more menacing, and its pull had reached the most powerful law enforcement agent in the country.

  US Attorney General Edwin Meese was said to be seriously considering a last-minute agreement with Panama to provide refuge to Linnas.

  Sher was angry and agitated. So much was at stake.

  Sending Linnas to the beaches of Central America would show the world that White House politics could easily undercut measured judicial rulings, crippling the Office of Special Investigations at a time when the unit was investigating five hundred suspected Nazi perpetrators in the United States. Sher wanted to plead his case directly to the attorney general, to urge him not to dismantle a series of unequivocal court rulings and the steadfast work of one of his own units inside the Justice Department.

  Instead, alone in his office, Sher made a quick decision. He tracked down the address for the residence of the Panamanian ambassador to the United States, slipped outside, and headed to Northwest Washington. It was dark when the taxi pulled up in front of the house.

  “Your ambassador should read this,” Sher said, thrusting a copy of the court ruling, with critical passages highlighted, at the aide who answered the door.

  At the relentlessly discreet Justice Department, Sher knew that behind-the-scenes maneuvering was broadly discouraged. But he had never been one to back down from a fight. With slicked, black hair and a jawline that some of his colleagues decided could have come straight from a Hollywood movie, Sher was a fretting, cursing, no-nonsense champion of the Office of Special Investigations.

  He had traveled to the Soviet Union in 1980 just after President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would boycott the Olympic games in Moscow as punishment for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Sher had interviewed witnesses for OSI’s first trial, coolly ignoring the men dispatched by the Communist government to trail twenty yards behind everywhere he went.

  Two years later, as Peter Black sunk into the case against Archbishop Valerian Trifa, Sher had asked to meet with officials at the West German embassy in Washington.

  “We’d like you to accept him as a deportee,” Sher pressed, hoping Germany would not only take back Trifa but put him on trial for war crimes.

  “Why should we take back your garbage?” an embassy official asked.

  Sher, more drill sergeant than diplomat, was quick with a reply. “We’re just returning the garbage that you created.”

  Over time, Sher’s supervisors at the Justice Department had learned to anticipate the combativeness, but until the Karl Linnas case, it had never been directed squarely at the attorney general of the United States.

  Screw it, Sher thought as he headed home, hoping his clandestine visit to the ambassador’s residence would convince Panama to turn Linnas away, no matter what the attorney general had to say about the matter.

  AT THE OFFICE the next morning, two top advisors summoned Sher to a meeting. Meese had decided to send Linnas to Panama, and the attorney general wanted Sher to prepare a new deportation order for sign-off by an immigration judge.

  Sher studied the advisors, wondering how he could possibly say no to what amounted to a direct order. Sher was fairly certain that William Weld, who would go on to become the governor of Massachusetts, and Stephen Trott, who would soon accept President Reagan’s nomination for a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, were on his side, wanting to see Linnas deported to his native Soviet Estonia. Not a single US court had objected. But the attorney general’s decision trumped all, and in this case the decision was Panama.

  Sher paused. He imagined Linnas living out his days on the resort island of Contadora in the Gulf of Panama, where the shah of Iran had found balmy refuge in 1979 when the Carter administration forced him to leave the United States. Slowly, Sher shook his head. In a level voice, he told Meese’s deputies that he wouldn’t revise the immigration order.

  Weld and Trott went to see the attorney general. Sher asked if he could go with them and wasn’t particularly surprised when he was turned down.

  Sher considered his next move. He walked to the offices of the attorney general and, within earshot of Meese’s secretary, picked up a phone and called Elizabeth Holtzman, the former congresswoman from New York who had pushed to create the Office of Special Investigations in the late 1970s. Sher needed support, a political powerhouse with strong ties to the Jewish community.

  “Is Liz there?”

  “Is it important?” Holtzman was now the district attorney in Brooklyn, and her secretary sounded rushed.

  Sher whispered, “Could not be more important.”

  Moments later, Holtzman came on the line.

  “It’s Linnas,” Sher said. “They want to send him to Panama.”

  “When?”

  “This afternoon.”

  Sher hung up, knowing there was little more he could do. For the third time in twenty-four hours he had defied his supervisors at the Justice Department. He started drafting a letter of resignation. He thought about Karl Linnas, waiting in a detention center in lower Manhattan, and Pat Buchanan, who several years later would argue that the diesel engines that pumped carbon monoxide into the gas chambers of Treblinka were not capable of killing.

  All Sher could do now was wait.

  IT WAS THE dark little details that wouldn’t fade away, that clawed back into the light and settled there, stubbornly, even after jokes or drinks or time away with family. Th
e lawyers and historians of OSI had come to recognize the symptoms, the sudden silences among colleagues in the middle of a gruesome discussion about war, the urgent need for a taste of something mundane. For air.

  For Peter Black, there was the enduring memory of a concentration camp survivor in Niagara Falls, Canada, who had paused for the briefest, loneliest moment when he realized that the face in one of the faded photographs that Black presented was familiar, a vicious German dog handler whom the survivor hadn’t seen in forty years.

  “This man shot a prisoner,” he said, pointing to the photo, and then excused himself, stumbled into the kitchen, and drank a swig of schnapps.

  For David Marwell, there was the young Jewish girl murdered by a high-ranking member of a Ukrainian militia group established by the Germans after they invaded eastern Poland in 1941.

  An eyewitness was asked about the girl’s murder. Did the man shoot at close range?

  The witness replied, “He was holding her hand.”

  For Eli Rosenbaum, there were late-night images of powerless parents forced with their children to the edge of a killing pit. “You try to imagine these things,” Rosenbaum often told friends and colleagues, “and then you try real hard not to imagine them. Or else you’re too paralyzed to do the work.”

  When Elizabeth Holtzman called after her conversation with Neal Sher, furious about the plan to send Karl Linnas to Panama, Rosenbaum quickly stepped in. They had only hours, or less, to try to stop the deportation.