It was the victims’ day in court yesterday in the trial of John Demjanjuk, the man accused of helping to kill 27,900 Jews in wartime Poland. Rudolf Solomon Cortissos, the son of one of the Holocaust victims, was so moved that he cried out and broke down in tears.
“This is all that I have left of my mother,” said the 70-year-old Dutch businessman, holding up a yellowed letter. “My mother Emmy threw it out of the train that took her to be gassed in Sobibor camp.”
Judge Ralph Alt asked to examine the letter and Mr Cortissos, fearing that he might lose the treasured item, seemed to suffer a panic attack.
A few yards away, lying impassively on a gurney set up in the Munich court house, was John Demjanjuk, charged with being a guard at the Nazi death camp in Sobibor.
The 89-year-old Ukrainian groaned, apparently with pain, but remained silent throughout the day’s testimony by the Sobibor families.
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It was a bizarre piece of judicial theatre that constitutes the last big Nazi war crimes trial on German soil; a final survey of the evidence underpinning the Holocaust.
The deportations from the Netherlands to Sobibor in eastern Poland always took place on Tuesdays. Mr Cortissos’s mother had been out to pick up asthma medicine when she was rounded up by German troops in the street and taken from central Amsterdam to Westbork, ready for deportation, supposedly to a labour camp. There were 2,500 people being held in the transit camp while the train was prepared for the three-day journey across Europe. The letter was dated May 17, 1943, and at its head it bore the crest of Emmy Cortissos.
“It’s Monday evening and we are ready to board the train,” she writes. “I promise you I will be tough. I will definitely survive. There is nothing that can be done about this.”
Plainly, Emmy — who must have thrown the letter out of the train window before it crossed into Germany, because the envelope bears a Dutch stamp — coded her letter, unwilling to give away the hiding place of her husband and son. There are the usual reminders of a dutiful mother: “Give Annie [her sister] my love and remember to congratulate her on her birthday . . . hope to see you again, many kisses.”
Mr Cortissos got his letter back from the judge yesterday. “It’s really all there is,” he said, showing it to The Times. “Apart from the cork stopper from one of her perfume bottles that I used to chew on while teething.”
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The fate of Mr Cortissos was unusual only in that his father survived. The letter was found among his father’s belongings when he died in 1959. “My father never talked about her,” said Mr Cortissos, giving a slight shrug. “It’s only now with age that these things are coming back.”
The recovered memories are the essence of the Demjanjuk trial. A sickly, retired Ohio car worker is in the dock in Germany and the only living witnesses against him are children of victims, rather than people who can make an accurate, positive identification. Only a paper trail and a single SS identity card link him solidly to the death camp.
The case against him is becoming an emotional one. The co-plaintiffs have travelled to Munich from the Netherlands, Israel and the United States, because they wanted to stare into the face of evil and close a circle in their lives. “I wanted to make eye contact with him, but I can see now that it is not going to happen,” said Mr Cortissos.
Mr Demjanjuk has spent much of the time lying on his side on the hospital gurney, looking away from his accusers. “Of course he is calculating that society will have sympathy on a sick man,” said Thomas Blatt, one of the few Sobibor survivors. “But I have a different view of people like him. I remember how they used to bayonet people into the gas chamber — later they would come out with blood on their shoes.”
David van Huiden, 78, from Amsterdam, lost his stepfather, mother and sister at Sobibor. He is alive today because they advised him: “Go walk the dog, go to non-Jewish friends, rip off the Jewish star.”
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Another survivor, Martin Haas, now 73, lost his mother, sister and brother in Sobibor and his father in Auschwitz. Now an oncologist in California, he survived because a Catholic friend of the family hid him under her cape and found him a safe house. “But it is only since 1999 that I really have known the fate of my family,” he told the court. “Perhaps I didn’t want to know. Many of us survivors didn’t want to know — it was too hard. We lived for the future.”
The Demjanjuk trial is becoming a kind of reckoning, an attempt to give personalities, identities and faces to the millions of Holocaust victims. The majority of the co-plaintiffs submitted a motion yesterday saying that Mr Demjanjuk should be tried as an accessory for even more murders; a total of 29,579. So far, the prosecutor has rounded down the numbers of Jews deported to Sobibor between March and September 1943, the month when Mr Demjanjuk allegedly served there. The prosecutor has gone for the lower figure of 27,900, saying that many died in transit. These deaths, he says, could not be attributed to Mr Demjanjuk, who allegedly emptied the trains in Sobibor and chased the Jews from the station to the gas chambers.
The plaintiffs argue, however, that Mr Demjanjuk was a cog in the extermination machine of the Nazis, and thus had to face some responsibility for the whole process.
It is unclear whether that motion will be accepted by the court. For the time being, Mr Demjanjuk’s defence team is still pleading that Germany is the wrong place to try their client.
“How can you regard him as a functionary within the German system when the Germans who were giving him orders held a whip in their hands?” said Ulrich Busch, a defence lawyer.
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Could it be that the Demjanjuk trial boils down to the classical defence that Mr Demjanjuk was just obeying orders? Mr Blatt prays not: “He had choices. He had free time, he had a weapon — he could have run away. But he didn’t.”