Day by Day, Crowd Has Grown : Demjanjuk Trial Proves Powerful Lure to Israelis

Moshe Joskovitz, who lives about 50 miles from here in Ashdod, got up at 5 a.m. one day last week to be sure of getting a seat at the war crimes trial of John Demjanjuk.

Joskovitz, 30, listened attentively to testimony by an escapee from the Nazi death camp at Treblinka, Poland. And by the time he got home that evening, Joskovitz had a powerful new sense of what his country means.

“As the son of survivors of the Holocaust, I have to say one thing,” Joskovitz remarked during a break in the trial. “If the state of Israel was established only because of this, it was enough.”

Because Joskovitz is a Hasidic, or ultra-Orthodox, Jew, his remark was particularly telling. There is a deep, religious-based ambivalence among many ultra-Orthodox Jews about Israel’s existence as a secular state. Some refuse to recognize its authority at all.

Demjanjuk’s trial has attracted scores of black-garbed Hasidic Jews, part of an extraordinarily diverse crowd of people turning up to be a part of what many regard as the pivotal event in modern Jewish history.

Demjanjuk is accused of a variety of offenses committed as a sadistic guard known as “Ivan the Terrible” at Treblinka, an extermination camp run by Nazi Germany during World War II. Only about 50 of about 870,000 Jews sent to Treblinka survived; they escaped during an inmate uprising in August, 1943.

Many Israelis were opposed to bringing Demjanjuk here in the first place. In contrast to the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, Israel’s only other war-crimes trial, some believed that putting Demjanjuk on trial could only serve to trivialize the attempt by Nazi Germany to wipe out an entire people.

Demjanjuk, after all, was alleged to have been no more than a mechanic, the man who ran the engines that pumped gas into the death chambers at Treblinka. Eichmann, on the other hand, directed the deportation and execution of millions of Jews.

Painful Experience

Other Israelis objected to trying Demjanjuk because they knew that the experience would be painful, bringing back memories they would rather suppress and resurrecting questions they would prefer to leave unasked.

But now that the trial is under way, they come anyway, like moths to a flame.

“You know, it’s very hard to hear all these things again,” said a Jerusalem shopkeeper who asked that her name not be used. “It takes everything out of you. (Because of the Holocaust) I have no one, no one in the world. I have no aunts or uncles. I have no grandparents.”

Nevertheless, she said, she listens to radio broadcasts of the trial, and she understands why others attend.

“These things are not rational,” she said. “People feel they owe it to history.”

Shevach Weiss, a member of the Knesset (Parliament) and a survivor of the Holocaust, said, “Things that were very important to me a week ago have no importance to me now.” An almost daily visitor at the trial, he said, “This is the most important place in Israel today.”

Crowd Grows Daily

On Feb. 16, when the chief judge, Dov Levin, officially opened the Demjanjuk trial, there were many empty seats in the courtroom, a concert hall that accommodates 300 people. But day by day the crowd has grown. By last Monday, authorities had squeezed about 75 additional seats into the hall, but there were still about 200 people trying to get in. On Tuesday, the people waiting outside got into shoving matches with the policemen and guards trying to keep order.

Last Wednesday, it was announced that the trial will be broadcast on closed-circuit television to a viewing hall near the courtroom.

A court spokesman, Yossi Hasin, estimates that with the daily turnover of spectators--people come and go as their time and available space permit--an average of more than 1,000 people a day have visited the courtroom.

Hasin said that reserved seats for schoolchildren coming in organized groups are booked through March.

Israel television, which had decided on minimal coverage because of a shortage of money and a perceived lack of public interest, is now scrambling to devote more time to the trial. It announced Wednesday that it would begin a weekly half-hour review of the trial highlights.

Educational Tool

All this interest has surprised and delighted Israeli officials, who hope that the trial will educate a new generation in the horrors of the Holocaust and thus drive home the country’s reason for being.

“Israel as a national entity is a child of the Holocaust,” said Zeev Sternhall, a political scientist at Hebrew University. “I can hardly see Israel coming into existence without the Holocaust. And Israelis, even those who are of non-European origin, consider themselves as, in many respects, rooted in the Holocaust of the Jewish people. The Holocaust belongs to our collective consciousness.”

Sternhall said the trial touches the essence of what Israel and Zionism are all about: “that Jews are no more objects of history but have become subjects of history--they have taken their fate into their own hands.”

A special Ministry of Education pamphlet instructs high school teachers on their duty to use the trial as the basis of class discussions.

In an introduction to the pamphlet, Shimshon Shoshani, the ministry’s director general, says: “The subject must be dealt with in such a way that every boy and girl in the country will feel as if they, themselves, walked out of the killing valley. Every one of them must feel as if he himself is the prosecutor and accuser in this trial.”

Some people hope that the trial will revive what they see as flagging world interest in bringing Nazi war criminals and their collaborators to justice more than 40 years after the end of World War II.

An editorial in Hatzofeh, the newspaper of the National Religious Party, said, “While the Eichmann trial was a trial of the Germans and Austrians who headed the murder apparatus, the Demjanjuk trial symbolizes the forces which aided in the slaughter . . . , other peoples whose hatred of Jews was no less than that of the Germans.”

It said that thousands of collaborators are still free, and added, “This trial must be the onset of a special effort to expose Nazi criminals hiding in various Western countries under fictitious names. . . . “

However deep their sense of justice or of shared tragedy, many Israelis admittedly come to the trial out of curiosity about a man accused of personally murdering thousands. Lydia Carni, a schoolteacher, said she wanted to see “what evil looks like.”

Appears Unfazed

The people stare at the face of Demjanjuk, who says he is a victim of mistaken identity, as if hoping to detect some telltale change of expression. They are disappointed. The bulky, 66-year-old grandfather seems not to be touched by what is going on around him.

Most spectators seem to believe that Demjanjuk is Ivan, and several broke into applause the other day when Treblinka survivor Pinchas Epstein pointed dramatically at the accused and said, “There he is!”

To some, it makes little difference whether Demjanjuk is Ivan.

“It doesn’t matter if he is guilty or innocent,” said Zigi Weiser, a survivor of another death camp, Auschwitz. “At least (the trial) shows that Jewish blood was not hefker (left unaccounted for).”

Some look at Demjanjuk and are able, despite their pain, to see another human being entitled to the benefit of the doubt until proved otherwise.

“All the time I think maybe, after all, it’s not him,” said Adam Zhelzhelni, whose mother and sisters died at Treblinka. “I want to know if he killed my mother. Forty years I’ve been looking for the answer to this question.”

Even for Moshe Joskovitz, the doubt makes it “very difficult” to listen to the testimony. “We are not sure as in the trial of Eichmann,” he said.