“Sir, will you state your name for the record?” the judge asked.
“My name is Valerian D. Trifa.” His eastern European accent hadn’t faded after three decades in America.
“How old are you?”
“I am sixty-eight.”
“Are you at this time under the influence of any type of alcohol, drugs or medication?”
“No.”
“Do you suffer from any types of illness which would in any way affect your ability to understand the nature and purpose of these proceedings, why you are here, and what could happen to you?”
“I am not fully healthy, but I am aware of why I am here, yes.”
“Do you understand the agreement which you heard read at this time and which has been signed by you?”
“I do.”
“Did you enter this agreement at your own free will and of your own decision?”
“Yes.”
“All right, thank you, Mr. Trifa.”
“Thank you,” Trifa said and sat back down.
Black knew that he would likely never again hear from Trifa, who was hoping to leave for Switzerland. Under federal law, deportable aliens had the right to choose a destination.
“All right,” the judge said. “I enter an order that he be deported to the country of designation.”
Coleman and Ryan started packing up, and Black watched months of research disappear inside boxes and briefcases. Ryan paused and turned to Black.
“Do you want to call the press on this?”
It was an unusually magnanimous offer. The Justice Department typically put only top lawyers before the media, not a historian who was earning less money and had less experience than some veteran government secretaries and paralegals. Black nodded and walked to a nearby office in the courthouse to make the call.
The next morning, the Chicago Tribune reported, “The deportation order was disclosed by Peter Black, historian for the Office of Special Investigations in the Justice Department.”
THERE WAS NO time to dwell on the government’s victory. Hundreds of clues and leads were waiting back in Washington. Some came from West Berlin, which had a central repository of Nazi rosters and records with names that could be vetted and potentially matched to those of men living in the United States. Other leads came from tips and media accounts.
One case was particularly compelling.
Years earlier, an article in a Soviet Lithuanian newspaper had alerted the Justice Department to a sixty-two-year-old Chicago man named Liudas Kairys, who had emigrated to the United States in 1949. He found work at the Cracker Jack Company, married another Lithuanian immigrant, and had two daughters.
The Soviets, responding to a request from US investigators, had produced a personnel file that showed that Kairys lied about his whereabouts during the war. On his visa application, Kairys claimed that he had worked on his father’s farm.
The records, however, showed that he had been a guard in 1943 and 1944 at the notorious Treblinka labor camp in German-occupied Poland, where Jewish prisoners were forced to haul great piles of coal and stone and load sand from the banks of a river. The labor camp was about two kilometers from the Treblinka gas chambers, and prisoners considered too weak to work were simply dumped overnight between the fences on the perimeter of the labor camp and sent to their deaths the next morning.
The Office of Special Investigations had gone to court to strip Kairys of his US citizenship, the first step toward deportation. Prosecutors had largely focused on his service at Treblinka, but his personnel file had also listed the name of a Polish village, southeast of Lublin, where Kairys had spent time in 1942 and 1943 before he went to Treblinka.
Trawniki.
In history books, in transcripts from the trials at Nuremberg, and in some captured German documents, Black had seen scattered references to Trawniki, where, on the grounds of an old sugar factory, the SS had trained and deployed guards for deportation operations in Jewish ghettos and for work in occupied Poland’s Nazi-run labor camps and killing centers. But historians had uncovered relatively little about the training camp itself or the extent of its role in the destruction of Poland’s Jews, a conspicuous gap in the history of the war.
There had to be something more, Black thought. The idea was intriguing, an unexplored sliver of history.
Poland had once been home to one of the largest Jewish populations in the world, 3.3 million people, second only to that of the United States. But in less than twenty months, the Germans had wiped out 1.7 million Jews in a mass-murder spree that had been code-named Operation Reinhard, after the SS general Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office and an architect of the Holocaust.
It had been an unprecedented and comprehensive operation: rounding up Jews from ghettos across German-occupied Poland and sending them on trucks, on freight-train cars, and on foot to three killing centers established solely for death. Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka had no need for holding cells because prisoners were killed upon entry in gas chambers within a few hundred yards of the train tracks.
The Jews of Lublin had been among the first to die. The village of Trawniki was forty kilometers away.
References to Trawniki, Black knew, had appeared in four other American court cases. In records connected to the Kairys case, OSI had identified Massachusetts resident Vladas Zajanckauskas, who told investigators in 1981 that he had been deployed merely as a server in the canteen at Trawniki. Since OSI had no records to contradict his story, lawyers agreed to set aside a case, at least until any new information emerged.
Back in the 1970s, federal prosecutors in Florida had pursued another man, a retired brass-factory worker named Feodor Fedorenko, who had served at the Treblinka killing center. Fedorenko had helped force trainloads of Jewish victims from the so-called reception area through the undressing barracks to the gas chambers, which were fed by a diesel engine removed from a captured Soviet tank. “Dante’s Inferno,” Treblinka’s commandant had called it. Before Treblinka, Fedorenko had also been stationed in the camp at Trawniki.
And so had another man, a Ford Motor Company worker found in the suburbs of Cleveland. Jewish survivors had identified John “Ivan” Demjanjuk as a sadistic guard who beat prisoners with a gas pipe on the final march to the gas chambers at Treblinka. The capture of the notorious “Ivan the Terrible” on American soil had drawn international headlines. Demjanjuk, too, had spent months during the war at Trawniki.
Records in the Demjanjuk case had revealed the name of yet another Trawniki alumnus, living in New York since 1952. Under questioning in 1980, Jakob Reimer had maintained that he worked only as an accountant and paymaster in the administrative offices at Trawniki, and no case was brought against him.
What had taken place in the little-known village in southeastern Poland? The answers, Black suspected, likely sat behind lock and key in Soviet and Eastern European archives.
In the busy months after the Trifa hearing, Black filed the information away, a mystery for another day.
Chapter Six
Light at Long Last
Warsaw, Poland
1984
On a frigid February morning in Warsaw, Peter Black set out for the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland, headquartered in a sprawling behemoth of stone and brick that stretched along Karola Świerczewskiego Street. The building was near one of the oldest and most prestigious avenues in the Polish capital, flanked by grand castles and manor houses dating back to the seventeenth century.
Black had come to accept an extraordinary offer, the chance to probe captured German records that no American investigator had ever seen.
For the first time since the war’s end, the Communist government in Poland had offered to open its archives to historians at the Office of Special Investigations. Black and David Marwell had traveled to Warsaw on research trips months earlier, and now Black was back to hunt for clues about three men in the United States suspected to have ties to an ethnic German
auxiliary police unit that had operated in the early part of the war.
The Main Commission was set up in a courthouse that bordered the old Jewish ghetto; the building had once been a meeting place for people on both sides of the ghetto wall. Black was eager to get to work, mining the thousands of war records collected by the commission since its founding by the Polish government in 1945.
He ducked inside the building with Jim Halmo, the chief of US consular affairs in Warsaw, who would accompany Black to a meeting with the commission’s director.
Black had never met Czeslaw Pilichowski, a noted scholar and author who had fought in the Polish Communist underground during the war and had gone on to chronicle the impact of German occupation on Polish life. Shown inside Pilichowski’s office, Black offered a polite nod.
The sixty-nine-year-old director was in no mood for pleasantries. He scowled in grand fashion at the two Americans, pacing and shaking his head. Black spoke German, not Polish, but he quickly picked up the message.
You Americans send spies into Poland, criticize our country in the press, and refuse to help us when we need it. Why should I help you?
It was the last thing Black expected, an emphatic, official lecture about the tumultuous state of affairs between the United States and the military dictatorship of Polish general Wojciech Jaruzelski. Studying the frowning director, Black had a terrible suspicion that the goodwill extended by Polish authorities had, quite suddenly, vanished.
BLACK HAD BEEN to Poland once before, six months earlier, to review war records in Warsaw, Poznan, and Radom, a city on the banks of the Mleczna River that was once home to thirty-three thousand Jews. Jim Halmo had offered a warm greeting as well as a series of instructions.
Don’t exchange money on the black market. Don’t take packages from strangers. Don’t accept unsolicited invitations. Assume that your hotel room is bugged.
Threatened by prodemocracy activists, the authoritarian Communist government led by General Jaruzelski had drastically restricted normal life and imprisoned hundreds of people. Twenty-two months earlier, Poland’s first postwar semi-independent trade union had been destroyed.
Black could see signs of the country’s economic and political struggles everywhere. He had dined in restaurants with ten-page menus but nothing much to offer except duck back or fried brains, which he washed down with vodka because it was the only safe thing to drink. On a ride back to Warsaw one night, a truck driver pulled over to help Black change a flat tire. Black gave the man five dollars for his kindness, knowing that its value on the black market equaled roughly three month’s wages. How sad, Black lamented, that finding money for basic comforts depended on such chance encounters.
For seven days during that first trip, Black had traveled along bumpy roads between Warsaw and Radom with a Polish lawyer and interpreter who worked as a paralegal in the US embassy. Squeezed next to Black inside a car the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, Danuta Antoszewska talked about growing up in the country’s eastern borderlands a generation before Black was born. As a teenager during the war, she had watched Germans march Jewish families into the woods. Moments later, gunshots pierced the air.
“I knew many of those people,” she said softly.
Black was touched that she talked so openly about her wounded country. Few other countries, Black knew, suffered more under German occupation than Poland, where the three death factories established by the SS had wiped out a people and a culture that had influenced Polish life for nearly six hundred years. Two other killing centers went up on territory annexed to Germany from western Poland: Chelmno, for the Jews of Lodz, Poznan, and the surrounding regions; and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Jews from all over northern, western, central, and southeastern Europe were sent to die.
Over the course of the Holocaust, three million Polish Jews were murdered. Nearly two million non-Jewish Polish civilians were also slaughtered, some after they were caught trying to help or hide Jews. Punishment by death often extended to the rescuer’s family, neighbors, and entire village.
Black was quiet as he listened to Danuta’s story, knowing there was nothing he could say. “That’s a burden to carry around,” he offered. “I can’t imagine.”
Once during that first trip, a research specialist at the Main Commission archives in Warsaw had pulled Black aside. It was late afternoon, and Black was heading back to a stuffy hotel room with nothing much to do except consolidate his notes and watch Polish police dramas on a black-and-white television.
“Do you have plans tonight?” the researcher asked, smiling. “Would you like to come meet some friends of mine?”
Black suspected that he had just been invited to a meeting of Poles sympathetic to the underground movement, Solidarity, an independent labor union launched in the late 1970s after factory, shipyard, and coal workers grew frustrated by the shortages that vexed the country under Communist rule. Over time, the movement would trigger an end to Communism throughout eastern and central Europe and ultimately reach all the way to the Soviet Union itself, but in Warsaw in 1983, Black knew only that police were arresting Solidarity supporters during late-night raids.
He paused, tempted to see history unfold in real time. The Solidarity movement had drawn support from a broad range of international leaders, including Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II. But Halmo had been adamant. “You’re not a reporter. You’re not a private historian. You are the United States government.”
Given the tension between the Reagan administration and the Polish dictatorship, Black couldn’t exclude the possibility that he might walk into a trap, accused of spying or engaging in sedition against the Polish government. He declined the invitation.
“Nie, dziękuje,” he mumbled in butchered Polish. No thank you.
He left Warsaw on a prop jet flanked by a soldier with a pistol holstered on his hip to deter hijackers. It’s in the Lord’s hands, Black told himself as the engine roared to life.
HE HAD DONE everything by the book during that first visit, and when the Polish government agreed to let him return in 1984 for another look at the country’s war records, this time at the Provincial State Archives in Lublin, he planned to stay for five weeks. What might he find buried in a forgotten storage room in a city where fewer than two hundred Jews had survived the war? Though some records had likely been lost or destroyed, Black imagined stacks of boxes filled with identity cards, interview transcripts, and Nazi rosters.
Broad access to the Polish archives gave the Office of Special Investigations a remarkable new way to improve its research methods. To gain access to documents controlled by Communist governments, the unit had always sent specific requests for records to a liaison at the US Department of State. The request would be edited and dispatched in a secure pouch to the US embassy in the country where the records were held.
In Poland, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would forward the request to the Federal Procurator’s Office, the Federal Archives Administration, and the security agencies, which would transmit the message to the local legal or archival authorities.
OSI had often waited months, sometimes years, for a reply, and even when copies of records were provided, they often lacked context—a note from one file, a roster from another—distinct puzzle pieces from disparate time periods and locations, having in common only a mention of the target of the OSI investigation.
But the government of Poland, more than any other Soviet Bloc country in the early 1980s, appeared inclined to grant unfettered access to its records. Black knew that thousands of Poles had fought on the Allied side during the war and that Polish Underground organizations had provided critical intelligence to the British and US governments. Exiled Polish leaders, in the early years of the war, had been among the first to reveal details of the mass killing of Jews, often in the form of eyewitness reports from a handful of survivors who had escaped the deportation trains or the killing centers.
Black had no way of knowing exactly what motivated the relative g
oodwill on the part of the Polish archival authorities or how long he might gain access to the records. He would move swiftly and carefully on his second research trip to Poland, gathering what he could.
He was looking forward to working again with Danuta, who had written to him over Christmas: “We all are waiting to the new year to come. What will it bring to all of us? Let’s hope peace and friendship.”
Now, standing in the Main Commission, Czeslaw Pilichowski was delivering a stern speech about US interference in Poland’s affairs. He glared at Jim Halmo. Danuta Antoszewska would not be escorting Black to the archives in Lublin. This time, the Communist government would provide a car, a driver, and its own interpreter.
The tirade lasted a good ten minutes, and just when Black thought he would be shown the door, Pilichowski appeared to cut himself off. He turned to Black, smiled as if greeting a longtime colleague, and said in German, “Would you like some tea?”
Surprised, Black could only stammer, “Ja, gerne.”
Sipping his tea, Black tried to reassure Pilichowski. “I’m not the CIA.”
Pilichowski just shrugged, but his face softened as he studied Black. “So what are you looking for?” he asked, scholar to scholar.
Black knew then that the tantrum had been theater, an exaggerated and intentional protest of alleged US intervention in internal Polish affairs. Black had been cleared to do his research.
AFTER SEVERAL DAYS in the archives of Warsaw, Black left the Polish capital, with block after block of squat, gray apartment buildings that had been built by the Soviets in the years after the war. He traveled south to Lublin, accompanied by a driver and the government’s interpreter.
Black had never been to Lublin, and he wandered the cobblestone alleyways of the old Jewish ghetto, covered in ice and snow. How difficult it must have been to live here, he imagined, in houses without heat, shut away behind gates and guards. There had been no running water and very little food, but just beyond the western border of the ghetto, Polish farmers and traders from the Lublin countryside had hawked fresh buns and meat in a teeming market that had functioned since the nineteenth century.
[2019] Citizen 865 Page 6
