Munich, Germany – Holocaust Survivors Give Tearful Testimony at Trial

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    John Demjanjuk in CourtMunich, Germany – A Dutch Holocaust survivor broke down today as he told a court how his mother was transported to the gas chambers in Sobibor, a Nazi death camp where John Demjanjuk is accused of being a guard.

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    In wrenching testimony on the second day of Demjanjuk’s trial, Rudolf Salomon Cortissos, 70, waved a letter his mother had thrown out of the train as she was taken to her death, before being led away from the court in tears.

    “It’s the only thing I have,” Cortissos, a co-plaintiff in the case, told reporters afterwards, again struggling to compose himself.

    In the letter, composed hours before she was put on a transport to Sobibor, his mother had written: “It’s Monday evening and we are ready to board. I promise you I will be tough and I will definitely survive.”

    “There’s nothing that can be done. It has to be like this,” she wrote, ending with a reminder not to forget a family member’s birthday and a wish that, tragically, would never be realised: “I hope to see you all again soon.”
    “Three days later, she was dead,” he said.

    During the harrowing testimony from a series of co-plaintiffs, the 89-year-old Demjanjuk lay on his side on a stretcher in his leather jacket, with a blue cap pulled over his eyes.
    He remained practically motionless throughout the 90-minute session.

    Asked if the accused wanted to address the court, Demjanjuk’s lawyer Ulrich Busch said he had agreed with his client that he would make no statement.

    Earlier, presiding judge Ralph Alt read out a selection of names of the 27,900 Jews and others, many from the Netherlands, who died in the period Demjanjuk is accused of being a guard at the Sobibor death camp.

    Another survivor, David van Huiden, 78, whose entire family was murdered in Sobibor, told the court: “I thought that at the end of the war, all my family would come back.”
    “No one said it was a one-way ticket.”

    Speaking to reporters, he attacked Demjanjuk for exaggerating his health problems to derail his trial.
    “We think it is like (in) a theatre,” he said, adding that a court in his native Netherlands would not permit an accused man to lie around on a stretcher.
    “I feel the German court is so eager to have a judgement, it will accept a trial in any form,” he said.

    The accused’s behaviour has angered many of the elderly Holocaust survivors, some of whom made it out of Sobibor, who had come to Munich to testify in the trial either as co-plaintiffs or as witnesses. None, however, can place Demjanjuk at the camp.

    Demjanjuk was wheeled into the courtroom, groaning and clutching his head at times, to hear the charges against him.

    Reading out the charge sheet, prosecutor Hans Joachim Lutz said Demjanjuk “assisted others in cruelly and treacherously killing human beings out of base motives.” He said he “believed too, in the racist ideology” of the Nazis.

    Demjanjuk’s son, John Jr., hit back in an e-mailed statement, saying: “There is not a scintilla of evidence indicating my father ever had any such ideology nor that he ever harmed a single human being.”

    The family of the 89-year-old Demjanjuk, who denies ever being at Sobibor, says he suffers from leukaemia and other illnesses and that he will probably not survive the trial.
    But medical experts cast doubt on how ill Demjanjuk is and on Monday again told the court he was well enough to be tried.

    Proceedings are already limited to two 90-minute sessions per day.

    As Tuesday’s proceedings opened, Busch read out a lengthy statement — drawing jeers from spectators in the courtroom — calling for the trial to be abandoned as Demjanjuk was being tried twice for the same crimes.
    The motion, widely seen as a delaying tactic, was rejected.

    Demjanjuk, who changed his name from Ivan after moving to the United States after World War II, was sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 for being “Ivan the Terrible”, a sadistic Nazi guard at another camp, Treblinka.

    But after five years on death row, the conviction was overturned by Israel because of doubts about his identity.

    The trial, billed as the last major case dealing with Nazi war crimes in Germany, is scheduled to last until next May.


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    2 Comments
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    anonymous
    anonymous
    14 years ago

    Demajanuk is a trawniki. The trawnikis were the Ukrainian auxiliaries who assisted the Nazis in throwing, pushing and clubbing to death Jews arriving in Sobibor to be gassed. It is really a theater even to hold a trial for this despicable creature.

    Anonymous
    Anonymous
    14 years ago

    Demajanuk is a trawniki. The trawnikis were the Ukrainian auxiliaries who assisted the Nazis in throwing, pushing and clubbing to death Jews arriving in Sobibor to be gassed. It is really a theater even to hold a trial for this despicable creature