Death camp survivor faces court grilling

Press, 25 February 1987, Page 10

Death camp survivor faces court grilling

NZPA-Reuter Jerusalem

A survivor of the Treblinka death camp who testified that John Demjanjuk was “Ivan the Terrible”, the brutal Nazi camp guard, today faces a defence challenge to his World War II memories.

Pointing a finger at Demjanjuk, a retired car worker from Cleveland, Ohio, Pinhas Epstein yesterday told a packed Jerusalem court in a trembling voice: “That’s him.”

Demjanjuk, who faces the death penalty if convicted of crimes against Jews and humanity, denies that he was Ivan and says he was never in Treblinka, where an estimated 870,000 Jews died.

Mr Epstein, aged 61, was the first of eight prosecution witnesses set to testify at Israel’s first Nazi war crimes trial in 25 years. Defence attorneys have called him back for crossexamination today after testing his memory with detailed questions. Mr Epstein, a resident of Israel since 1948, was imprisoned in the camp in

Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942 at the age of 17. He was given the job of removing corpses from its gas chambers, but managed to escape in a prisoner revolt in August, 1943.

The witness wept as he described how a Ukrainian guard known as “Ivan the Terrible” ordered a prisoner to have sex with a girl who had survived the gas chamber. Demjanjuk sat stonefaced beside a policeman and translator as Mr Epstein, choked with emotion, described how the bewildered girl stumbled out of the gas chamber and asked for her mother.

“Ivan took one man from among us, Jubas,” Mr Epstein said. “He beat him brutally with his whip and ordered him to take off his pants.” Mr Epstein said “Ivan” told the prisoner to have sex-with the girl but the man refused. The girl was then taken to a pit and shot.

Mr Epstein also described how “Ivan” pressed the button to activate engines that poured carbon monoxide into the

gas chamber. He said “Ivan” stabbed the corpses afterwards with a sword or bayonet.

“I cannot even compare him to an animal, because animals do not attack when they are satisfied,” Mr Epstein said.

He said Ukrainian guards herded him and his neighbours from a Polish ghetto to Treblinka in a freight train on the night after Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement.

A defence lawyer, Mark O’Connor, challenged Mr Epstein’s identification of his client by reading testimony that the survivor gave at other trials and to Nazi hunters.

Under defence questioning, Mr Epstein told the court that "Ivan’s” partner at the gas chamber wore a black uniform. Mr O’Connor then asked him to read a deposition he gave to Israeli Nazi hunters in 1960.

“According to what it says here, I said he did not wear a black uniform,” Mr Epstein said, reading from the testimony. “But it is my recollection that he did wear a black uniform.”