Demjanjuk Extradition

This letter is in reply to one written by by Craig Holoboski (March 26), “Demjanjuk Case.”

To those persons who shed tears whenever this country apprehends a war criminal and extradites him, I only wish that they were better informed.

The Nuremberg Trials established punishment for “crimes against humanity.”

In the case of John Demjanjuk, the sadistic brute at the Treblinka Death Camp in Poland, where approximately 900,000 Jewish martyrs, men, women and children perished under the most inhumane conditions, described as “Dante’s Inferno” by the camp commandant, justice has been frustrated for the past 40 years.

Along with thousands of other war criminals scattered about the globe, Demjanjuk (dubbed “Ivan the Terrible”) misrepresented his past and was allowed to slip into this country.

He has enjoyed a freedom that he never granted to those tens of thousands of his innocent victims.

Treblinka was one of the numerous murder mills, under a systematic program of torture and extermination of 6 million Jewish souls by Germany.

As to the issue of whether the State of Israel is the appropriate site for Demjanjuk’s trial, where else on earth are death camp survivors more concentrated than in Israel?

What people can testify to those unimaginable brutalities of the German Nazi psyche than those survivors in Israel?

And most important, Israel represents symbolically, a determination of a people to survive over Hitler’s death machine.

SHEL SCHORR

Malibu