Ryazan, Russia – The witness has grown old and sick. He sits propped on pillows while the snow piles up outside. Recovering from a stroke, he languishes in a cramped apartment because his legs are too frail to negotiate five flights of stairs.
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His name is Alexei Vaitsen. He is one of the few Jews to survive the torments of the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp and the only member of his family who lived to see the end of World War II.
His thoughts these days are hundreds of miles away, in a distant courtroom where the fate of another sick old man is being weighed. John Demjanjuk, who is accused of being a guard at Sobibor, lay on a bed before a judge in Germany last week because, he said, he was not well enough to sit upright.
In Munich, where Demjanjuk is on trial, other aged prisoners have climbed into the witness box. They described the sadism of the guards, detailed the terrors of gas chambers and talked about Jews being led obliviously to their deaths. None of them could remember Demjanjuk.
Vaitsen says he can. He doesn’t recognize the more recent photographs of the elderly man with white hair. But he swears he remembers the fresh-faced guard in an old snapshot. And after decades of silence, he seems eager to tell anybody who will listen.
“It’s him. I know him,” Vaitsen, 88, says vehemently. “I’m 100% sure.”
After all, he says, there were only a few hundred guards, and he spent more than a year living in terror of their whims.
Are his memories as solid as he thinks? If so, does his evidence help anybody? He wants to know whether, in this trial of frail bodies and dying embers of memory, his story is relevant.
Reports of Vaitsen’s account filtered out in Europe this week, and German investigators say it is up to the court to decide whether to call him as a witness. The chief investigator, Kurt Schrimm, said he could be brought in at any time. But retired investigator Thomas Walther, who led the effort that resulted in Germany prosecuting Demjanjuk, expressed skepticism that after so many years and so much publicity, Vaitsen could suddenly provide anything new.
Vaitsen and his family say he has lived with his secrets for decades.
“Everything is hidden inside him,” said his grandson, 38-year-old Alexander Vaitsen. “He wakes himself up screaming.”
There was a time when Nazi hunting carried a sense of glamour and immediacy. For decades, survivors, Israeli agents and man hunters tracked down the former tormentors. They stripped away false names, plucked criminals from balmy exiles and pushed for justice.
Still, he is thinking about that trial.
“I’ve seen him in the camp. He was a guard there,” Aleksey told RT. “He was trying to save his life by taking the lives of others. I’ve always believed in God. When I was in the death camp, God was my only hope. And I know that he will be punished. It just can’t be that a person who caused so much pain could go unpunished.”
“There was so much dirt and so much death,” Vaitsen said. “And he was a horrible man.”
Ilya Altman, director of Russia’s Holocaust Museum, says all guards were perfectly aware of what they were doing.
“Everybody who volunteered to be a guard had to go through special training and had to pledge allegiance to the Third Reich. And every guard, at some point or another, took part in the extermination process. They all realized what they were there for.”
It was in Sobibor that Aleksey Vaitsen spent 15 months hovering between life and death and where, he says, he first saw Demjanjuk.
One of less than 50 Sobibor inmates to survive the war, Aleksey is the only living person who claims to have seen Demjanjuk at the camp.
This will be the first time German prosecutors have ever questioned him. Dmitry Plotkin, aide to Prosecutor of the Ryazan region, says they should hurry:
“Those who study the history of the Holocaust have known about Aleksey for years. It’s a tragedy that such an important eyewitness is being forgotten while his health and his memory wither away. Time is playing in favor of the defense’s side here.”
Can someone help this Yid unload the great burden he is shlepping around – nebech! All those metal badges he is wearing all the time! They must weigh at least fifty pounds! If someone would help by taking it off so he doesn’t always lug them around – he might get the proper rest and energy to properly recooperate. Ki sireh chamor sonacha roivetz tachas masaoi…
Good for him, to live to see this trial! I wonder what all those medals are for, though.
The yid is a fine jew…He looks old in this picture but he has warm jewish heart and he is a very proud jew ! Those who know him will testify to that !
I would venture to guess that he just put the jacket on for the picture and doesn’t wear it 24/7. But even if he did, who are we to even mention it?? His tzoros from the war make him untouchable! Read a holocaust book before commenting.
Anyone who has a 90+ year old Zeideh can relate to this man. They went through trials that would destroy today’s generation. They lived with nothing material and lived by their wits alone. Now their body’s are weak and they can barely walk. Let this man say what he remembers to a court and let his words live forever as his living aidus to his terrible experiences.
I was going to comment about some of the posts above but am speechless. I think some posters started Mishenichnas Adar early. Keep infantile and dumb comments off the board.
Such ignorance by my fellow Yidden is beyond embarrassing. It is very common to see Russian veterans of WW2 wear their well-deserved medals. These people fought in an unimaginable hell to defeat the Germans, and the fact that Russia nearly was destroyed is part of the psyche of the Russians to this day. Why would the people who helped stop the Nazis not be proud of what they did? It is a shame, that with all the implications of this story, and its significance for the Jewish world, some morons would pick up and skylight such narishkeit about an old veteran wearing his decorations. For shame!
to #1 : you are a discusting human being. you will be luckt to achieve one percent of what this proud man achieved. as his medals attest, this man bravely fought the nazis: same nazis who killed 6 million jews. may he live to 120 and have the biggest blessings from hashem.