HOLOCAUST : Jews in Australia Upset by Acquittal in 1942 War Crimes

To his supporters, Ivan Timofeyevich Polyukhovich was a simple pensioner, a gray-haired, ailing Ukrainian immigrant of 76 who tends bees and a neat vegetable garden in northwest Adelaide.

To prosecutors, however, Polyukhovich was a mass murderer. They charged him with involvement in the massacre of about 850 people from the Jewish ghetto of Serniki in Nazi-occupied Ukraine in 1942. If convicted, he could have faced life in prison.

For nine weeks, the jurors heard grisly testimony. One witness said he saw Polyukhovich shoot three people with one bullet, then crush a survivor’s skull with his rifle butt. Video footage of an exhumed mass grave in a pine forest outside Serniki showed hundreds of skeletons, face down, in layers. Most had been shot in the head.

But Australia’s first and probably last Nazi war crimes trial ended in acquittal last week. A South Australian Supreme Court jury in Adelaide took less than an hour to find Polyukhovich not guilty of crimes against humanity.

The landmark case has left prosecutors and many Holocaust victims here bitter about trying to pursue Nazi crimes so long after the war. Another war crimes prosecution is pending against an ethnic German, but the case is unlikely to reach trial. Charges against a third immigrant were dropped last year for insufficient evidence.

“I am depressed and disillusioned,” said Konrad Kwiet, chief historian of the Special Investigation Unit set up by the government in 1987 to determine if Nazi war crimes could be prosecuted in Australia. The unit ultimately identified 834 potential suspects, and conducted 18 major investigations, before funding ran out last June and it was disbanded.

“I think the trial became counterproductive,” Kwiet said in a telephone interview. “Because an acquittal in a war crimes trial gives evidence to those who argue there were no war crimes or the Holocaust.”

Australia has about 15,000 survivors of the Nazi death camps--the world’s second highest per capita community of Holocaust victims after Israel, Jewish leaders say. “There’s no Jew in Australia who didn’t lose someone in the Holocaust,” said Jeremy Jones, executive vice president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

More than 4,000 indigent Jews in Australia have applied to Germany since December for reparations under a new compensation program that provides a one-time payment of about $4,500 and a monthly pension to those who spent six months in a concentration camp or 18 months in a Nazi-controlled ghetto or in hiding.

“We had expected only a handful, a few hundred at most,” said Steve Denenberg, executive director of Jewish Community Services in Sydney, which is helping process claims. He said many of the victims are anguished about the Polyukhovich verdict.

“There’s anger (that) it’s taken these cases so long to come up . . . frustration at bringing the case at all because . . . the tyranny of time after 50 years makes it so difficult.”

Although the Nazi war crimes law is still on the books, future prosecutions are unlikely, said Ron Weiser, head of the State Zionist Council.

“There’s very little support for continuing these cases,” he said. “It’s not a priority for anybody except the Jewish community.”

That’s little solace for those who survived the Nazi horrors.

“We want justice, not revenge,” said Marika Weinberger, 64, an Auschwitz survivor who lost 25 family members in concentration camps and now heads the Australian Assn. of Holocaust Survivors. “Somewhere out there, here in Australia, are people who committed these crimes against humanity. They live a very comfortable life. And they got away scot-free.”