The Only Surviving Album of Auschwitz

The Only Surviving Album of Auschwitz

This is the story of a Hungarian Jewish woman who survived Auschwitz
and found a coat belonging to a guard which she took to shield her from the
cold immediately after her liberation. In the pocket of this coat she found
a photo album. It contained pictures of what went on in this extermination
camp. Imagine her reaction when she saw a picture of herself coming off of
the train as well pictures of her family who were already murdered. This
album at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem was donated by this woman in 1980 and will
forever be displayed there. When you have 5 minutes of peace and quiet in
front of your computer, watch it and consider passing it around to people
that you know so they can share it and know about it. It is truly moving
and important.

Click on link .... Turn on your sound

http://www1.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/album_Auschwitz/mutimedia/index.HTML

The Auschwitz Album

Gathering the fragments - Holocaust

Gathering the fragments - Holocaust

05/01/2011 22:26


As generation of survivors dwindles, it's of paramount importance that we dedicate ourselves to continuing the process of gathering fragments.

During the Shoah, an entire world was shattered. The remaining scattered fragments vary infinitely in size, shape and texture – from documents to diaries, testimonies to artifacts, photographs to works of art. Despite their wide dispersion, they can still be found in many places – government and private archives, libraries, and even in the homes of people who went through the vortex of the Shoah, and members of their families left behind. Each fragment tells its own tale and, like a thread, has a beginning and an end. These threads of information, intersecting and combining, are then woven together into a broad and deep tapestry that depicts a multifaceted story stretching over time and space. In this way we can reconstruct as much of the shattered Jewish world as possible, the events that led to its destruction, and the lives that continued to be lived while the devastation unfolded.

Since its inception, Yad Vashem has strived to collect every relevant source of information, each of which enlightens us in its own unique way about the six million Jews murdered and the millions more persecuted and victimized during the Holocaust. Yet some shards remain locked in the memories of those who were there, still waiting to be expressed in word or art. Others languish in desk or dresser drawers, in old suitcases, or in shoeboxes. And some are precious, kept close to the heart and seldom shown to others. The fragments we collect have universal meaning for us as human beings, national meaning for us as Jews, and often very personal meaning as well.

AS A child I always knew that my grandmother Irma, my father’s mother, had been in Auschwitz. My grandmother died in 1970, when I was still quite young, and all I knew of what she had endured were the disjointed bits and pieces she had told me. Among other diffuse facts, I remember her telling me she had engaged in some sort of factory work, and that she was together the entire time from her deportation to her liberation with her daughterin- law. At the end of the 1970s, when I first read Raul Hilberg’s monumental book the Destruction of the European Jews, in which he discusses labor in Auschwitz, it seemed to me I had learned that she had probably worked for the giant IG Farben concern.

Quite a few years later, when I was already director of the Yad Vashem Library, I saw a fragment that told me a bit more about her travails. It was a deposition my grandmother had written for a lawyer to obtain compensation from the German government. When the lawyer passed away, his family sent his entire archive to Yad Vashem. From that document I learned that my grandmother at some point had been transported from Auschwitz to Trautenau. It would be a long time before other fragments would come to light.

Among the millions of documents recently made available to at Yad Vashem by the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Arolson, Germany, I found several references to my grandmother, with the help of my colleagues. She appears on a list of women prisoners in Parschnitz, which is also known as Parschnitz-Trautenau, dated October 1944. Directly following her on the list is her daughter-in-law. So they were definitely together in the camp in autumn 1944. At the head of that list, it says the women were working for AEG. So now it much more plausible that the factory work my grandmother engaged in was in Parschnitz, not Auschwitz, and for AEG and not IG Farben. Lastly, on her daughter- in-law’s ITS registration card, the date she (and most probably my grandmother) reached Parschnitz is listed as August 1, 1944. According to the card, the two were in the camp until it was liberated on May 9, 1945 – the last day of the war in Europe.

So uncovering one thread, following others, and weaving them together has yielded at least a tiny part of the greater tapestry. Yet even from such a small illustration there are things we can learn. This story illustrates that Hungarian Jewish women sent to Auschwitz, later reached other camps, where they worked and suffered. It shows that companies besides the infamous IG Farben concern, some still thriving today, were complicit in their suffering.

So, especially now, as the generation of survivors dwindles, it is of paramount importance that we dedicate ourselves to continuing the process of gathering fragments and putting them into context. The tools of the 21st century – the Internet, social networks, digitization and international cooperation – offer much hope that we will enrich and expand our portrait of events. Seventy years after the advent of the systematic mass murder of the Jews and the coalescence of the Final Solution, it is vital that the enriched tapestry – and the insights we draw from it – remain in constant view. The more we further our knowledge of the Holocaust and keep it in our consciousness, the better chance we have of molding a world free from prejudice, hatred and crimes against humanity.

Stepping stones of the Nazi Era

Stepping stones of the Nazi Era

04/30/2011 23:50


Evian, Auschwitz, the Pinelli brothers all explain why, for Jews, the Nazi era is more significant than any other.
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The painter Max Liebermann was a lucky man. He died in the third year of the Nazi era – in February 1935. The Nazi era began in January 1933, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Liebermann was a world-famous German Jewish painter, the father of German impressionism and of the Berliner secession school. He was a committed Berliner, born and bred in the capital. He lived with his wife Martha in the Pariser platz, in an apartment overlooking the Brandenburg gate (when asked for his address, he would say: “I live in Berlin,” first turning to the right). He was born in the same house his father and grandfather were born in. The Liebermanns also had a summer house in fashionable Wannsee district – not far from another Jewish-owned villa where the infamous Final Solution conference took place some years later. When he saw from his window the Nazi march of victory, he commented: “I cannot eat as much as I would like to vomit.”

In the first year of the Nazi era, he resigned from the presidency of the Prussian Arts Academy to protest the academy’s decision not to exhibit works by Jewish artists. None of the members of the Academy showed any interest or sympathy. He lived to see the first measures taken against Jews by the new regime, but passed away before it enacted the Nuremberg laws, and while many Germans still believed the Nazis were a passing phase.

Liebermann was indeed a lucky man. Before he died, he wrote the then-mayor of Tel Aviv, Meir Dizengof: “with much sorrow, I realize that I woke up from the dream of assimilation to a nightmare.”

His surviving wife was not that lucky. In the seventh year of the Nazi era, she was forced to sell the Wannsee villa to a German Aryan. In the twelfth year, at age 85 and incapacitated by a stroke, she was told that the police would come and deport her to the Terezinstat concentration camp. They came in the afternoon with a stretcher to carry her out. Despite her weakness, she managed to commit suicide by swallowing barbiturates before they dumped her on the stretcher. Her last words were: “If I cannot live in Germany, at least I can die here.”

THE NAZI era is certainly more relevant to mankind than any other. This was the era in which the word “not” was struck off the commandment “thou shall not kill.” And, therefore, it divides human history into “before” and “after” more significantly than any other time. To Jews, this division is especially relevant: the Holocaust was not like a road accident, but a culmination of stages of hatred, persecution and brutality. To be a Jew after the Holocaust is different from the days preceding the Nazi era. True, Jews were not the only victims of the murderous Nazi offensive: millions of non-Jews – including Germans – were also killed. But all Jews were by definition sentenced to die because of their birth. And in this they were alone.

And there is another important distinction: for Jews, the stepping stones of the Nazi era were not confined to the horrific events of World War II, but extended to events which took place before and after the war.

From a Jewish point of view, Evian is a name as relevant as Auschwitz. In July 1938, President Roosevelt convened an international conference in Evian-les-Bains to deal with the plight of “refugees” – the word Jewish was not mentioned in the invitation. The conference ended with a flat refusal to give shelter to these refugees from Germany and Austria. These people belonged to the elite of Europe and would have enriched the arts, industry and science of any host country. They were refused shelter only because of their Jewishness.

Europe at the time was full of homeless refugees, but only the Jewish displaced persons had no home to go to. When they went back to their former home countries, they found them Jew-less and infested by the same old hatred, culminating in pogroms in a few cases. Great Britain closed the gates of Palestine to these refugees, thus preventing them from joining the Jewish Yishuv – the only community ready to give them shelter. And one cannot forget the circles in the pre-reconciliation Vatican, which encouraged Catholic monasteries not to return Jewish children – who were sheltered there during the war – to their families. There were many such cases, and we shall never know how many children were not claimed back because all their relatives had perished. The most notorious case was the refusal of a French monastery to hand over the two Pinelli brothers to their Jewish relatives. It took a long time for the relatives to get custody of the two orphans. Only in July 1953 – the 20th year of the Nazi era – were the brothers allowed to join their cousins in Israel.

These stepping stones – Evian, Auschwitz, the Pinelli brothers – explain why, for Jews, the Nazi era is more significant than any other.

The future of Holocaust education

The future of Holocaust education

05/01/2011 22:20


Remembrance isn't a static picture of the past; it's also a dynamic task for the future, which poses major challenges for the Jewish world.
On the 27th of Nissan we remember the victims of the Holocaust. However, remembrance is not a static picture of the past; it is also a dynamic task for the future, which poses major challenges for the Jewish world.

One of these challenges is education of our own youth. We are grateful that many survivors are still with us. We embrace them with the full strength of our love. And yet the generation of those who emerged from the jaws of the Nazi beast is increasingly retreating from our lives. Tomorrow’s Jewish children will have to remember the Holocaust without the immense emotional power of meeting actual survivors. It will be an important task of Jewish education to bridge this gap.

We also must demand that the non- Jewish world keep the memory of the Holocaust alive – and much remains to be done in this regard. True, six years ago, International Holocaust Remembrance Day was established by the United Nations, and it is being observed in many countries. True, the amount of Holocaust education in the democratic world has increased in the past decade or two. And yet there are valid reasons to worry.

A recent UNESCO-commissioned study by Israeli educational scientist Dr. Zehavit Gross of Bar-Ilan University showed that Holocaust lessons in Western countries often lead to massive anti-Semitic reactions from students. This does not mean the dimensions of Holocaust education should be reduced. On the contrary, we need a much wider educational effort aimed at all age groups and population strata.

The message we need to get across is straightforward. He who defiles another human being’s dignity, let alone takes his life out of baseless hatred, commits a transgression against the spirit of humanity and against God who created all of us in His image. It is not enough for parliaments to make Holocaust denial punishable by law. Rather, let us repeat to the nations of the world the commandment of the Torah: “The stranger who lives in your midst… you will love him as yourself.”

OF COURSE, I am not naïve. The hatred of Jews is unlikely to disappear. We ourselves bear the main burden of responsibility for securing our existence. The fight against anti- Semitism remains a primary task. It is a sorry state of affairs when Jewish communities need police protection from anti-Semites. It is a disgrace when Jews, recognizable as such by their clothes or just by a kippa, must be watchful in the streets of London, Paris or Berlin lest they become targets of abuse and violence.

But of course, the main targets today are the Jews of Israel, who are threatened with a second Holocaust by the Iranian leadership. The debate as to whether it is permissible to compare these would-be annihilators with the Nazis is beside the point, for if they should ever succeed, the results are likely to be similar.

The threat to Israel’s very existence is not new. In 1948 Israel’s Jews faced Arab armies which invaded the newborn Jewish state with the explicit purpose of destroying it. The ability of the nascent Israel Defense Forces to defend the country was by no means a foregone conclusion. Later threats, in 1967 and in 1973, were repelled, but the enemy’s message remained clear: We want to kill you. As for Iran, despite Israeli deterrence, there are scenarios under which the Iranian regime could well attempt to use its future nuclear arsenal to “wipe out the Zionist regime from the pages of history.”

No less alarming than the Iranian intention is the miserable failure of the democratic world even to significantly slow the Iranian effort to obtain atomic weapons. Obviously, the prospect of another Holocaust against millions of Jews is not considered a reason for action.

This is a sobering thought. Of course, a nuclear Iran would be a strategic threat to the West, too. Israeli Holocaust researcher Prof. Yehuda Bauer once observed that World War II was started by an anti- Semitic regime that murdered six million Jews. However, he noted, 29 million of the 35 million people who died between 1939 and 1945 were non-Jews. This, Bauer said dryly, should give non-Jews a reason to ponder.

Yet we see that the world has not learned its lesson. We must do all we can to change this attitude. This, too, is part of the legacy of the Holocaust and its victims, whom we remember and honor on Remembrance Day.

Lessons from the Shoah - Holocaust

Lessons from the Shoah - Holocaust

05/01/2011 04:54


As history becomes replaced by narratives and universalism sets the tone, the lessons of the Holocaust seem set to disappear.
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Three statements come to mind whenever I write about the Holocaust. The first I can attribute to Elie Wiesel: “The Shoah wasn’t a crime against humanity, but a crime against the Jews.” The second was told to me by writer Haim Guri: “Israel was created not because of the Shoah but in spite of it.” I don’t remember who told me the third, but it is no less valuable: Had there been a Jewish state in the 1930s, the Holocaust might not have happened at all, or would have been on a much-reduced scale.

Do I get tired of emphasizing these three points? Of course. But I can’t bring myself to stop.

As history becomes replaced by narratives and universalism sets the tone, these lessons seem set to disappear. They are being transplanted by more fashionable inclusive versions: The Holocaust does not belong to the Jews, but to anyone who has been the victim of violence; and Israel grew out of the Nazi atrocities and not because of any intrinsic right of the Jewish people to their own land. Sadly, it is often Jews in the Diaspora who fail to internalize the last message: Israel isn’t the cause of anti-Semitism around the globe, it is the answer.

Twice a year the world marks Holocaust Remembrance Day. To be more precise, the world marks it once – on January 27, the day Auschwitz was liberated. For the past few years it has become a set feature on the United Nations calendar. Unfortunately, for the rest of the year the world body raises motion after motion turning Israel into the source of all evil. Its protection of global peace and wellbeing is so advanced that having finally suspended Libya from the UN’s Human Rights Council, it seems set to replace it with Bashar Assad’s Syria.



Israel commemorates Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day – or Yom Hashoah as we call it – in the spring, fittingly between Passover and Independence Day. This year it commences on May 1.

Here it is marked with an eerie twominute siren for which the traffic draws to a halt and people stand frozen. Fewer and fewer have their own dreadful memories, but this is not about the survivors. They don’t need a special day to remember how they’ve been through hell. This is about the people who didn’t survive but nonetheless live on in every generation.

Children in Israel learn about the Holocaust from an early age. Even toddlers in day-care centers are taught to stand for the siren, and schoolchildren hold ceremonies. But it’s hard to explain the horror or take in the meaning of the number of those killed. That’s why it’s so important to learn the personal stories.

It’s easier to relate to the individual experience than try to comprehend how six million lives ended, whole family trees cut down at the roots.

This year, under the title “Gathering the Fragments,” Yad Vashem launched a national campaign to rescue personal items from the Holocaust period, calling for ordinary citizens to provide documents, diaries, photos, artifacts and works of art from those terrible years.

Future generations will find it ever harder to relate to the Holocaust, not just because the firsthand witnesses are dying out, but because they are being brought up in a different world.

It is an ever-changing world dominated by the “now” and the “me.”

When President Barack Obama hosted a Seder at the White House earlier this month he coolly compared the uprising in the Arab world to the story of the Exodus from Egypt. It’s a perfect message for the Twitter generation. With the perspective of barely three months – during which he changed his mind more than once – Obama takes the most epic event in more than four millennia of Jewish history and reduces it to its lowest possible common denominator, and then distorts it some more.

I can’t wait to hear his insights on the Holocaust.

THE WORLD is marking 50 years since the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a trial which gave us terms like “the banality of evil.”

Have we learned its lessons? It doesn’t seem so when, under the same principle of universal justice, Israeli leaders cannot travel to places like Britain for fear of being arrested for “war crimes.”

As the Shoah becomes more universalized it is being dumbed down – the greater the attempts to apply it to all, the less relevant it becomes. The Holocaust, as Wiesel noted, was about the systematic attempt to eradicate the Jews, their religion and their culture.

That was it. We can and should learn from it but we can’t change it.

The Shoah was not about the Palestinians, but you wouldn’t know it from the imagery that floats around on “human rights flotillas” and among their land-based supporters.

As the Palestinians draw closer to the likely unilateral declaration of independence, they seem to grow further from acknowledging Israel’s right to exist. The Jewish state, as Guri noted, would have grown faster and stronger had there been no Holocaust; the Holocaust would have been smaller and shorter had there been a Jewish state to offer sanctuary.

Recently, the topic of teaching the Holocaust in Arab schools has been the focus of heated debates.

According to Palestinian Media Watch, this week the union of UNRWA workers in Palestinian schools said, “We emphasize our adamant opposition to confusing the thinking of our students by means of Holocaust studies in the human rights study curriculum, and emphasize study of the history of Palestine and the acts of massacre which have been carried out against Palestinians, the most recent of which was the war against Gaza.”

Confusing indeed.

By the “war against Gaza” I assume they mean Operation Cast Lead, a war against Hamas missile attacks from Gaza on Israel. Missile attacks that are still taking place, for that matter. The Palestinians are not the new Jews, and Gaza is not a ghetto.

If their version of human rights permits targeting an Israeli school bus and indiscriminately launching rockets on any civilian population within reach, then you can understand their reluctance to add the Shoah to study programs.

Several people have e-mailed me recently telling me they feel like this is a repeat of the 1930s. Those who live abroad cite attacks on Jews, but above all a pervasive feeling that permits and even fosters such incidents.

The tiny Jewish community of Corfu might have been surprised by the burning of Torah scrolls in the local synagogue this month, but Jews elsewhere in Greece are no strangers to anti-Semitic sentiment. Ditto the Jews of Spain, France, Denmark and Holland. A Canadian student told me she no longer wears a Star of David on campus, and some British Jews have removed the mezuzot from outside their doors, placing them inside where they cannot be seen.

My answer is that this is different from those terrible years partly because there is an Israel, albeit threatened by Iran with nuclear genocide and constantly assaulted by terror attacks and missiles, but a success story nonetheless. Indeed, a Gallup poll released last week declared Israel to be the world’s seventh most “thriving” country.

There can be no better way to avenge the Shoah.

This Week in History: The creation of the Gestapo

This Week in History: The creation of the Gestapo
04/29/2011 12:37


On April 26, 1934, one of the most feared, brutal, atrocious state security services ever known to mankind was officially established in Germany.

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

In his oft-quoted statement describing apathy toward the arrests of "others" in Nazi Germany, German Pastor Martin Niemöller actually wrote of the supra-judicial Gestapo roundups that targeted political dissidents, Jews and general "undesirables." Niemöller too was arrested by the Nazi secret police in 1937 and sent to the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps for speaking out against Hitler’s Nazism; he was one of the few who survived. Millions of others rounded up by the Gestapo and shipped off to Nazi death camps were not so lucky.

On April 26, 1934, one of the most feared, brutal and atrocious state security services ever known to mankind was officially established in Germany. From its earliest days, the Gestapo, eagerly tasked with suppressing and eliminating all dissent against Nazi power and ideology, was a feared institution that put a stranglehold on the minds and bodies of hundreds of millions of Germans and Europeans that fell under Nazi control. Several years after its inception, the Gestapo also played one of the most central roles players in the most notorious act of genocide in history – the Holocaust.

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Soon after Adolph Hitler’s rise to power, the face of Nazism recognized the need to consolidate political control - which meant eliminating all dissent. With much of the opposition going underground, however, an intelligence mechanism was needed to track and root them out. The product of a consolidation and reorganization of German police intelligence and political divisions, the Gestapo initially operated mainly against communists, religious clerics and any political opposition, including student groups. The first concentration camp, Dachau, was built by the Gestapo to hold, torture and murder the dissenters it rounded up.

From its early days when of eliminating political opposition to its infamously efficient genocidal program, the Gestapo drew its power from the fact that it was not accountable to anybody but itself. Only two months prior to its establishment, the clauses of the Weimar Republic’s constitution that guaranteed civil liberties and due process had been suspended. The Gestapo was allowed to act with complete freedom of action and impunity. Completely outside of administrative checks and balances, Nazi jurist Dr. Werner Best, wrote of its authority, "As long as the [Gestapo] carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally." The prospect of holding such great power attracted various Nazi officials to seek control over the Gestapo. From its inception, a number of commanders sought its reins, sometimes seizing control through accusations of planned coups.

With its leadership (at that point, Heinrich Himmler) gaining more and more power under Hitler’s fascist regime, the Gestapo quickly grew from a regional force to one that would eventually be responsible for most of the European continent. When Hitler began invading Germany’s neighbors, the Gestapo’s unrestricted jurisdiction was applied in all of the German-occupied territories. It would be instrumental in rounding up the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and other “undesirables” as part of the genocide that became the Holocaust.

As the Nazi program to murder Jews progressed, the Gestapo was given full responsibility for the “extermination of undesirables.” Expanding on the model of Dachau, where mostly political dissenters were brought at first, the Gestapo and its B4 division (known as its “Jewish Affairs” division) imagined and realized the network of horrifying concentration camps that would eventually kill six million Jews and millions of other “undesirables.”

One of the most famous targets of the Gestapo roundups was Anne Frank. Tipped off through a highly developed network of informants, the Gestapo successfully searched for and located nearly all of Dutch Jewry, some of whom who had gone into hiding like Frank and her family.

The Gestapo was one of the most integral institutions of the Nazi regime, which enabled it to carry out unprecedented genocide. Gestapo officers intimidated and elicited, coerced and forced information from citizens in its mission to locate Europe’s Jewish population. In coordination with the SS, it facilitated their deportation and eventual mass murder in Nazi concentration camps. Although long relegated to the annals of history, the Gestapo remains very much alive in the story of the genocide and terror carried out by the Nazis.

Holocaust justice: The final chapter - Holocaust

Holocaust justice: The final chapter
05/01/2011 04:57


John Demjanjuk, who turned 91 in April, is possibly the last person who will ever be held accountable for war crimes associated with the Holocaust.
John Demjanjuk is 91 years old. The retired auto worker from the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills who came to be known as “Ivan the Terrible” and the subject of the most protracted war crimes case in history, is on trial in Germany for mass murder committed before most people alive today were born, and nearly 33 years after he was first identified.

Demjanjuk might be the last person to be held accountable for war crimes associated with the Holocaust.

The year he was identified, the Toronto Blue Jays played their first baseball game, “Star Wars” was released, Elvis Presley died, a new computer company introduced the Apple II, an unknown standup comedian named Jay Leno first appeared as a guest on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and the US Attorney’s Office asked a survivor of the Treblinka extermination complex to look at some old photos.

He recognized a man from a 1951 immigration photo and identified him as a guard who prisoners called “Ivan the Terrible.” Two other survivors also recognized the man in the photo. It was Demjanjuk.

Since 1977, Demjanjuk has been denaturalized, ordered deported, instead extradited to Israel to stand trial for crimes against humanity, convicted, sentenced to death, acquitted on appeal, returned to the United States, had his citizenship restored, denaturalized again four years later, ordered deported again, unsuccessfully appealed to the Supreme Court, faced an extradition request from Germany, spared from deportation by a Federal Judge, again ordered to be extradited to Germany to stand trial for war crimes, spared from extradition because of ill health, found to be faking the seriousness of his illness, and finally extradited to Germany, where he is currently being tried for war crimes.

TODAY, COUNTLESS Americans still believe Demjanjuk is as he always claimed – a victim of mistaken identity who never participated in the Holocaust.

This erroneous sentiment was formed from seriously flawed reporting on the Israeli trial and the acquittal, skillful public relations by his supporters, blunders made by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigation (OSI), the fact that Demjanjuk was not a German but, rather, a Soviet POW who volunteered to work as a death camp guard, and of course, his insistence that he never worked for the Nazis.

Immediately after his identification, his public image morphed into that of an infamous singular Nazi war criminal known in WWII history as “Ivan the Terrible.” Although reports noted that he was a camp guard, his perceived role in the Holocaust grew, in part because the sadism and brutality attributed to Demjanjuk was extraordinary, even by Nazi standards.

The OSI did nothing to counter the misperception, and in fact nudged it along by inadvertently withholding the findings of a Polish investigation of the death camps in Poland that a number of Ukrainian guards were known to inmates as Ivan the Terrible.

On February 16, 1987, John Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel for crimes against humanity. Prosecutors produced abundant evidence that Demjanjuk had “...perpetrated unspeakable acts of cruelty in conducting victims in the Treblinka concentration camp on the way to their death.”

Testimony was graphic and gruesome. However, the single count in the extradition and the indictment was operating the gas chambers at Treblinka.

After his conviction and sentencing, the appeals tribunal accepted evidence, unavailable during the trial, that either a different or another “Ivan” operated the gas chambers. Because of this, in 1993, the judges reluctantly acquitted a man they knew to be a murderer. Although the 405-page acquittal described other acts of murder and torture Demjanjuk committed while serving at various concentration camps, including Trawniki, Sobibor, Treblinka, Flossenberg and Regensburg, American media framed the acquittal as a validation of his mistaken identity claim. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the acquittal “...prove[d] Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible,” and a short time later published an editorial titled “It’s Time to Close the Book on the Demjanjuk Case.”

Not quite.

Because the OSI failed to reveal the likelihood of additional Ivans the Terrible, the federal courts readmitted him to the United States, and temporarily restored his American citizenship.

Inescapably ironic is that the clarity so lacking in the American public’s understanding of Demjanjuk might emerge from his war crimes trial in the very country that provided him with such a genocidal “job opportunity” in the first place.

Some American observers who acknowledge Demjanjuk’s participation in the Holocaust have suggested that perhaps he had no choice, since conditions in German POW camps might have been sufficiently harsh to justify such a decision.

However, in an observation from his classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl provided a contrary perspective on the moral nature of such a decision: “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

The writer is a former radio talk show host living in Silver Lake, Ohio and the author of Untangling John Demjanjuk, published in Midstream Magazine. He frequently lectures on the John Demjanjuk case.