by Philip Roth
“Perhaps it was a mistake on my part,” replied Rosenberg. “Perhaps I should have noted it, but the fact of the matter is that I did hear all of this, and I have always said that in the course of the uprising, I didn’t see what was happening all around me because the bullets were shrieking all around us and I just wanted to get away as quickly as possible from that inferno.”
“Naturally,” said Chumak, “everyone would want to get away as quickly as possible from that inferno, but if I could proceed, did you see this guard being strangled by everybody and thrown into the well—did you see that?”
“No,” said Rosenberg, “it was told to me in the forest, not just to me, everyone heard about it, and there were many versions, not only that one.…”
Justice Levin asked the witness, “You were inclined to believe what people told you, people who had escaped as you did, to freedom from the camp?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” said Rosenberg. “It was a symbol of our great success, the very fact that we heard what had been done to those Vachmanns, for us it was a wish come true. Of course I believed that they had been killed and that they had been strangled—it was a success for us. Can you imagine, sir, such a success, this wish come true, where people succeeded in killing their assassins, their killers? Did I have to doubt it? I believed it with my whole heart. And would that it had been true. I hoped it was true.”
All of this having been explained yet again, Chumak nonetheless resumed questioning Rosenberg along the very same lines—“Didn’t you see all of these events, sir, that I have read out to you?”—until finally the chief prosecutor rose to object.
“I believe,” the prosecutor said, “that the witness has already replied to this question several times.”
The bench, however, allowed Chumak to continue and even Judge Tal intervened again, more or less along the line of what he had asked Rosenberg only minutes before. “Do you agree,” he said to the witness, “that it emerges from what you wrote down, if one just reads what you wrote down—that one simply cannot tell what you actually saw for yourself and what you heard about later? In other words, anyone reading this would be inclined to think that you saw everything. Do you agree?”
While the questioning dragged on about the method by which Rosenberg had composed his memoir, I thought, Why is his technique so hard to understand? The man is not a skilled verbalist, he was never a historian, a reporter, or a writer of any kind, nor was he, in 1945, a university student who knew from studying the critical prefaces of Henry James all there is to know about the dramatization of conflicting points of view and the ironic uses of contradictory testimony. He was a meagerly educated twenty-three-year-old Polish Jewish survivor of a Nazi death camp who had been given paper and a pen and then placed for some fifteen or twenty hours at a table in a Cracow rooming house, where he had written not the story, strictly told, of his own singular experience at Treblinka but rather what he had been asked to write: a memoir of Treblinka life, a collective memoir in which he simply, probably without giving the matter a moment’s thought, subsumed the experiences of the others and became the choral voice for them all, moving throughout from the first-person plural to the third-person plural, sometimes from one to the other within the very same sentence. That such a person’s handwritten memoir, written straight out in a couple of sittings, should lack the thoughtful discriminations of self-conscious narration did not strike me, for one, as surprising.
“Now,” Chumak was saying, “now this is really the heart of the whole exercise, Mr. Rosenberg—the next line of what you wrote in December of 1945.” He asked Rosenberg to read aloud what came next.
“‘We then went into the engine room, to Ivan, he—who was sleeping there—’” Rosenberg slowly translated from the Yiddish in a forceful voice, “‘and Gustav hit him with a shovel on the head. And he remained lying down for keeps.’”
“In other words, he was dead?” Chumak asked.
“Yes, correct.”
“Sir, on December 20, 1945, in your handwriting?”
“Correct.”
“And I suppose this would be one very important piece of information in your document, sir, would it not be?”
“Of course it would be a very important piece of information,” Rosenberg replied, “if it were the truth.”
“Well, when I asked you about the whole document, sir, the sixty- eight pages—I asked you whether you made an accurate and correct version or recital of what occurred at Treblinka. You said, at the very beginning of my cross-examination—”
“I say again yes. But there are things which I heard.”
In front of me young Demjanjuk was shaking his head in disbelief at Rosenberg’s contention that eyewitness testimony recorded in 1945 could be based on unreliable evidence. Rosenberg was lying and, thought the son of the accused, lying because of his own unappeasable guilt. Because of how he had managed to live while all the others died. Because of what the Nazis had ordered him to do with the bodies of his fellow Jews and what he obediently had done, loathsome as it was for him to do it. Because to survive not only was it necessary to steal, which he did, which of course they all did all the time—from the dead, from the dying, from the living, from the ill, from one another and everyone—but also it was necessary to bribe their torturers, to betray their friends, to lie to everyone, to take every humiliation in silence, like a whipped and broken animal. He was lying because he was worse than an animal, because he’d become a monster who had burned the little bodies of Jewish children, thousands upon thousands of them burned by him for kindling, and the only means he has to justify becoming a monster is to lay his sins on my father’s head. My innocent father is the scapegoat not merely for those millions who died but for all the Rosenbergs who did the monstrous things they did to survive and now cannot live with their monstrous guilt. The other one is the monster, says Rosenberg, Demjanjuk is the monster. I am the one who catches the monster, who identifies the monster and sees that he is slain. There, in the flesh, is the criminal monster, John Demjanjuk of Cleveland, Ohio, and I, Eliahu Rosenberg of Treblinka, am cleansed.
Or were these not at all like young Demjanjuk’s thoughts? Why is Rosenberg lying? Because he is a Jew who hates Ukrainians. Because the Jews are out to get the Ukrainians. Because this is a plot, a conspiracy by all these Jews to put all Ukrainians on trial and vilify them before the world.
Or were these nothing like John junior’s thoughts either? Why is this Rosenberg lying about my father? Because he is a publicity hound, a crazy egomaniac who wants to see his picture in the paper and to be their great Jewish hero. Rosenberg thinks, When I finish with this stupid Ukrainian, they’ll put my picture on a postage stamp.
Why does Rosenberg lie about my father? Because he is a liar. The man in the dock is my father, so he must be truthful, and the man in the witness box is somebody else’s father, so he must be lying. Perhaps it was as simple for the son as that: John Demjanjuk is my father, any father of mine is innocent, therefore John Demjanjuk is innocent—maybe nothing more need be thought beyond the childish pathos of this filial logic.
And in a row somewhere behind me, what was George Ziad thinking? Two words: public relations. Rosenberg is their Holocaust PR man. The smoke from the incinerators of Treblinka … behind the darkness of that darkness they still contrive to hide from the world their dark and evil deeds. The cynicism of it! To exploit with shameless flamboyance the smoke from the burning bodies of their own martyred dead!
Why is he lying? Because that’s what public relations is—for a weekly paycheck they lie. They call it image making: whatever works, whatever suits the need of the client, whatever serves the propaganda machine. Marlboro has the Marlboro Man, Israel has its Holocaust Man. Why does he say what he says? Ask why the ad agencies say what they say. FOR THE SMOKESCREEN THAT HIDES EVERYTHING, SMOKE HOLOCAUST.
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.* 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?”
“Of course,” replied Rosenberg, “if I were sure he had been hit and in accordance with the version I wrote down, he was then dead—where is the scar? But he wasn’t there. And he wasn’t there—because he wasn’t there.” Rosenberg looked beyond Chumak now and, pointing at Demjanjuk, addressed him directly. “And if he had been there, he would not be sitting across from me. This hero is grinning!” Rosenberg cried in disgust.
But Demjanjuk was no longer merely grinning, he was laughing, laughing aloud at Rosenberg’s words, at Rosenberg’s rage, laughing at the court, laughing at the trial, laughing at the absurdity of these monstrous charges, at the outrageousness of a family man from a Cleveland suburb, a Ford factory employee, a church member, prized by hi
s friends, trusted by his neighbors, adored by his family, of such a man as this being mistaken for the psychotic ghoul who prowled the Polish forests forty-five years ago as Ivan the Terrible, the vicious, sadistic murderer of innocent Jews. Either he was laughing because a man wholly innocent of any such crimes had no choice but to laugh after a year of these nightmarish courtroom shenanigans and all that the judiciary of the state of Israel had put him and his poor family through or he was laughing because he was guilty of these crimes, because he was Ivan the Terrible, and Ivan the Terrible was not simply a psychotic ghoul but the devil himself. Because, if Demjanjuk was not innocent, who but the devil could have laughed aloud like that at Rosenberg?
Still laughing, Demjanjuk rose suddenly from his chair, and, speaking toward the open microphone on the defense lawyers’ table, he shouted at Rosenberg, “Atah shakran!” and laughed even louder.
Demjanjuk had spoken in Hebrew—for the second time the man accused of being Ivan the Terrible had addressed this Treblinka Jew who claimed to be his victim in the language of the Jews.
Justice Levin spoke next, also in Hebrew. On my headphones I heard the translation. “The accused’s words,” Justice Levin noted, “which have been placed on record—which were, ‘you are a liar!’—have been—have gone on record.”
___
Only minutes later, Chumak concluded his examination of Rosenberg, and Justice Levin declared a recess until eleven. I left the courtroom as quickly as I could, feeling bereft and spent and uncomprehending, as numb as though I were walking away from the funeral of someone I dearly loved. Never before had I witnessed an encounter so charged with pain and savagery as that frightful face-off between Demjanjuk and Rosenberg, a collision of two lives as immensely inimical as any two substances could be even on this rift-ravaged planet. Perhaps because of everything abominable in all I’d just seen or simply because of the unintended fast I’d been on now for almost twenty- four hours, as I tried to hold my place amid the spectators pushing toward the coffee machine in the snack bar off the lobby, there was a ragged overlay of words and pictures disturbingly adhering together in my mind, a grating collage consisting of what Rosenberg should have said to clarify himself and of the gold teeth being pulled from the gassed Jews’ mouths for the German treasury and of a Hebrew- English primer, the book from which Demjanjuk had studiously taught himself, in his cell, to say correctly, “You’re a liar.” Interlaced with You’re a liar were the words Three thousand ducats. I could hear distinctly the admirable Macklin oleaginously enunciating “Three thousand ducats” as I handed across my shekels to the old man taking the money at the snack bar, who, to my astonishment, was the crippled old survivor, Smilesburger, the man whose million dollar check I’d “stolen” from Pipik and then lost. The crowd was so tightly packed behind me that no sooner had I paid for coffee and a bun than I was forced aside and had all I could do to keep the coffee in the container as I pressed toward the open lobby facing outdoors.