[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  She brought home six dollars after each shift. They had no money for meat, and Feliks often complained that he looked like a rucksack without a new suit and shoes. But Lucyna couldn’t believe their good fortune, the doctors, nurses, and Jewish organizations that wanted to see them settled in New York.

  The United States was a magical, generous place. And when Lucyna and Feliks had a baby boy two years later, she decided that America was also, finally, home.

  THE COMMANDERS OF Trawniki issued one final order in the spring of 1945 as Soviet forces pushed west into the Czech lands, headed for Prague: burn your papers and run.

  Jakob Reimer, always one to follow directions, ditched his Trawniki uniform, slipped into civilian clothes, and made his way south and west toward Munich. His life depended on his ability to keep his identity a secret, to blend as a civilian into the mass of displaced persons milling through central Europe at war’s end.

  If he was found out, the Soviets would call him a traitor; the Americans, a Nazi collaborator. He struck up a relationship with a twenty-two-year-old Polish woman for cover. To survive, he would have to put his past behind him.

  The retreat from Trawniki had begun in July 1944, four months after Reimer was granted citizenship in Nazi Germany. As the Soviets advanced toward Lublin, Trawniki commander Karl Streibel ordered his troops to withdraw west. Hundreds of Trawniki men deserted the battalion, diminishing the ranks, but Reimer and seven hundred others had faithfully stayed on, guarding bridges, buildings, and Polish forced laborers.

  The men had pressed further west, to Dresden, Germany, and then south into the Czech lands, before the unit dissolved and the men scattered in every direction. After Nazi Germany surrendered, Reimer found his way to Munich. Bombs had leveled much of the city, but construction crews would soon rebuild block after block to preserve the prewar street grid.

  US forces controlled Munich, which meant that Reimer would have to find a way to appeal to the Americans. In Trawniki, his ability to speak German had earned him a job as a platoon leader. In Munich, Reimer decided to once again leverage his language skills. He got a job with the US Army’s 26th Station Hospital, chauffeuring GIs to Hollywood movies. At night, he frequented dance halls.

  Still, it would be best if he could start again. Safest. By 1951, ships with thousands of refugees were leaving Germany, bound for the shores of America. In passing the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, the Congress of the United States had offered to provide refuge to hundreds of thousands of Europeans, particularly those who said they were fleeing Communism.

  Reimer filled out an immigration application, careful to note that he had worked only as an interpreter for the German army during the war. He presented the application to American authorities, along with a letter of recommendation from a Red Cross supervisor whom Reimer had worked with in Munich:

  A conscientious worker whose concern for his job takes priority over personal interest. Honest and dependable. Neat in appearance and has a pleasing outgoing personality. Would make a good American citizen.

  Reimer likely would have received quick approval, but US authorities flagged the case after learning that he had applied for citizenship in Nazi Germany in 1944. The US Army Counterintelligence Corps launched an investigation. What was Trawniki? Reimer had noted his service at the camp on his German citizenship application.

  He told the Americans that he had been only a guard-soldier and interpreter, and later a paymaster in the Trawniki administration. It had been mundane work for the Germans, he said, bureaucratic in nature.

  Luckily for Reimer, the US State Department had little information about the significance of the training camp that Odilo Globocnik had created to prepare thousands of recruits for some of the bloodiest jobs in occupied Poland.

  In June 1952, eighteen months after Lucyna and Feliks Wojcik set sail for America, the USS General M. L. Hersey left Bremerhaven, Germany, and crossed the choppy waters of the Atlantic. It eased into the harbor in New York City, where David Garroway was anchoring the Today Show and Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra were on a winning streak that would take the Yankees to their fourth consecutive World Series.

  Hundreds of European refugees spilled out onto the streets of the city. One of them was Trawniki recruit 865.

  Part Four

  United States

  1996–2013

  Chapter Seventeen

  Long After Dark

  Washington, D.C., and New York City

  1996–1997

  How much easier it might have been, the people of OSI often mused, if the Soviet Union had remained an ally in the years after the war, eager to share evidence about the lethal operation at the Trawniki training camp and the men who had so faithfully served the Third Reich. Instead, the Soviets had kept their own investigations secret, and there had been hundreds, conducted from the late 1940s to the 1960s, long before the Office of Special Investigations began its work.

  For years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Peter Black had dispatched his team of OSI historians to the archives of former Soviet states. Amid thousands of pages of notes and rosters, the historians found criminal files for former Trawniki men who had returned to their homes at the end of the war. Most had been found guilty by the Soviet courts for deserting the motherland and fighting for the enemy. They had spent years in prison.

  The documents provided firsthand accounts of the Trawniki operation, a window into the minds and methods of the men who had served there, and Black had devoured every word. By Black’s count, Trawniki commander Karl Streibel had recruited and trained more than five thousand men, the force that Odilo Globocnik had imagined in those early, dizzying months of the war.

  Black had studied the movements of Trawniki units and collected biographical information on the recruits. On particularly intense days, when the office seemed to fade away, lost to the words on the documents sprawled across his desk, Black could see the military drills, imagine the weight of the mission, sense the fear in the barracks where Jews were held as laborers until Heinrich Himmler decided that every remaining prisoner in the Lublin District had to die.

  How many Trawniki men were living in America? Black had no way to know for sure, but by the mid-1990s, investigations of the men who served there had become a top priority.

  On the rosters in Prague, Barry White had found the name Bronislaw Hajda, Trawniki recruit 3069. An initial check with the Immigration Service had turned up nothing, but on a second try White identified a retired machinist living in the suburbs of Chicago. Hajda had trained at Trawniki, served with Liudas Kairys as a guard at the Treblinka labor camp, and in July 1944 participated in shooting as many as seven hundred prisoners in a nearby forest, just prior to abandoning the camp.

  White had also identified Trawniki man Wasyl Lytwyn, a shipping clerk in Chicago, who had fought to suppress the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto.

  Vladas Zajanckauskas, the Massachusetts man who claimed he had only served in the canteen at Trawniki, was under investigation too, since the rosters in Prague reinforced the suspicion that such lowly duties did not fit with his high rank. A second roster from the Federal Security Service archive in Moscow had come in, identifying Zajanckauskas as a senior instructor at Trawniki who had participated in the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto.

  Using military identification numbers found in the avalanche of documents, OSI for the first time could track the career paths of Trawniki men from when they were put into the system at the training camp to their deployments in Jewish ghettos, forced-labor camps, and killing centers. Some men, like Jakob Reimer, had stayed on until the very end, following Streibel as he fled the Soviet invasion of southeastern Poland with a battalion of seven hundred men.

  It was tedious work, with historians scattered among the archives across Eastern Europe and Black scrambling in Washington to synthesize the findings. White, as head of research and development, was trying to match names from the European records to those on American records from INS, army background
investigations, POW camps, and military hospitals.

  One day in October 1996, Black closed the door to his office and settled in for a long afternoon of reading. A thick batch of documents had come in from the provincial Federal Security Service archives of Krasnodar in the North Caucasus, a region in European Russia between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.

  Black was tired, which wasn’t unusual. At home he was busy helping to care for his son, Aaron, who had slipped away on several occasions. On a weekend visit to OSI, Aaron had worked his way down a back staircase into a parking garage and ended up caught behind some fencing. He had once wandered into a birthday party in a neighbor’s yard, picked up a Pepsi, and sat down between two strangers. To keep Aaron safe at night, Black and his wife, Mary, slept lightly, listening for footsteps on creaking floors.

  In his office, Black started sorting through the new documents, discovered by OSI historian David Cameron. He settled on an eyewitness statement by an ex-Trawniki man that had been taken by the Soviets in 1964. The document, stamped by the directorate of the Federal Security Service in Moscow, included a name that Black quickly recognized: Rajmer.

  It was a phonetic transliteration of Reimer from Russian Cyrillic, used by the translator that OSI had commissioned. Black read on.

  One day in the spring of 1942, about twenty to thirty of us SS men were placed into motor vehicles and driven from Lublin along a highway about fifteen kilometers from the city. This group included RAJMAR, AKKERMAN, and BEK. They were our commanders. A guard unit…then began to bring groups of thirty or more Jews—including men, women, children, and old people—in covered trucks up to the place on the highway where we had got out of our vehicles.

  The first group of perhaps thirty doomed people delivered there was surrounded from all sides and led deep into the forest. During the march, they began to throw their things away and were very upset. The children and women were crying.

  Deep in the forest, about one kilometer from the road, we saw a large pit that had been dug out and around which some [Security Service] officers with submachine guns were standing. There were about four or five of them. All the doomed people had to sit down about ten meters from the pit. We Wachmanner were posted in surrounding positions.

  Then AKKERMAN, RAJMAR, and BEK used their rifle butts to prod the victims and force the fear-crazed people to stand up in groups of five to seven people. They marched them to the pit and then, along with the Germans, shot those people.

  After having finished off all the adults and children, we returned to the road, and the escort unit gave us the next group of twenty-five to thirty people who had been delivered there by vehicle. We escorted them to the pit in the forest, where they were shot in similar circumstances by the fascist officers, with the direct participation of BEK, RAJMAR, and AKKERMAN. A total of about 250 to 300 people were shot during that day.

  It was a detailed description that placed Reimer at a pit shooting in a forest near Lublin in the spring of 1942, when the first massive ghetto deportation had taken place.

  Black picked up another eyewitness statement, also taken by the Soviets in 1964. A second Trawniki man had placed Jakob Reimer at the site of the shooting, though this statement inexplicably used both Rajmer and Rajmont.

  When the doomed people realized they were in a forest with us SS members, some of them started to cry and throw their things, and eventually, all of the adults and children were doing this. They apparently understood they were going to their deaths. The doomed people we had delivered were ordered to sit down on the ground about fifteen to twenty meters from the pit. The crying and moaning continued among them.

  We Wachmanner were posted at points five, fifteen, and twenty meters around the execution site. Then, on orders from the fascists, AKKERMAN, RAJMONT, and one of the other Gruppenwachmanner used their rifle butts to hit the terrified men, women and children and old people—many of whom were crying hysterically—to make them stand up, pushed them to the pit in groups of five to seven people, and then they and the fascist officers shot the Jews.

  Was this the same shooting that Reimer had described to Eli Rosenbaum and Neal Sher in New York in 1992? Black had no way to know for sure, but whether there had been one mass shooting or many, the statements were graphic confirmation that Reimer had participated in an execution of Jews as an armed Trawniki platoon leader. Black paused, taking in the eyewitness accounts, murderers describing murder in the most ordinary way.

  He thought about Ned Stutman, OSI’s newest lawyer. Black had been raised without religion, but he knew that fifty-one-year-old Stutman was deeply connected to his Jewish identity and to family that had escaped the Ukraine region in the years before the war. Stutman had grown up in a kosher home. His father had been president of the neighborhood synagogue.

  Yet in interviews with accused Nazi perpetrators, Stutman was congenial and unusually sensitive, keenly aware that he was talking to a damaged human being who was, above all else, innocent until proven guilty. How would such a compassionate man react to the particularly devastating images described in the eyewitness statements?

  IN MATTERS OF love and law, Ned Stutman had never seen a need for equivocation, which is why, in the winter of 1967, twenty-five years before he would become a prosecutor at the Office of Special Investigations, he had straightened his shoulders, studied the young woman in front of him, and said simply, “I love you, I know it. Can I marry you?”

  She declined the offer, finding a marriage proposal on a first date altogether peculiar. When he called the next day to say that he had smuggled a transistor radio out of her brother’s bedroom and would return it only if she agreed to a second date, she nearly said no again. They married six months later, swaying to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 as the sun streamed through the glass ceiling of their wedding hall.

  At twenty-one, Ned Stutman was devout, both as a Jew and as a son of Philadelphia, where cheesesteaks and Eagles games were considered something of a religious experience. Law school seemed the most logical choice for a career path, given his ability to fill a room, dominating conversations about Vietnam and civil rights and presidential politics.

  White hot light, his wife Suzanne decided, impossible to turn away.

  Stutman enrolled in law school at Temple University and took a job teaching history at a Catholic school in Camden to pay the bills.

  “Mr. Stutman,” one of the nuns had said, sizing up his olive skin, long eyelashes, and thick beard. “We’ve never had an Italian here before.”

  He grinned. “Sister, I hate to tell you this, but I’m Jewish.”

  She paused. “Well, we’ve never had one of those either.”

  He launched his law career prosecuting criminals for the district attorney’s office in Philadelphia and eventually became a public defender, taking on a widely watched case of a black man accused of killing a white police officer.

  “Aren’t you conflicted about defending this man?” Suzanne asked early one morning as the case dragged into 1975. “It’s a terrible thing to kill a cop.”

  “Everybody deserves a just trial,” Stutman answered.

  By way of good-bye, he lowered his face to hers so that their fluttering eyelashes touched. A “butterfly kiss,” he had come to call it.

  Suzanne sized up her husband, striking in his Brooks Brothers suit. He was a fastidious dresser, likely because he had spent much of college with holes in his gym socks. Suzanne knew that her Birkenstock sandals and tousled hippie hair made an odd contrast to his polished wingtips and silk ties the color of salmon.

  Stutman turned to public-interest law, helping people with disabilities find transportation and housing, and in the early 1980s he moved with Suzanne and their children to a red-brick row house in a leafy neighborhood of Northwest Washington. He practiced disability law and then went to work for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

  Stutman had transferred to OSI in 1992, soon after Jakob Reimer met with Eli Rosenbaum and Neal Sher at the US At
torney’s Office in Manhattan. Reimer had left that day a free man and Rosenbaum had left with a headache, stunned by Reimer’s murder confession.

  OSI would seek to strip Reimer of his US citizenship and then deport him, perhaps to Germany, Poland, or Ukraine. Stutman would lead the prosecution.

  By October 1996, after several years of tedious pretrial work, the office was in full trial mode. Stutman huddled with Peter Black for hours, poring over the history of the Trawniki training camp and Reimer’s confession about the shooting at the pit near Lublin. The conversations were grueling, and at home after work, Stutman often poured himself a glass of vodka on ice and sat alone on the porch, trying to distance himself from images of war. His children waited in the kitchen, knowing that when their father was ready, his head clear, he would bound into the house and bellow in a deep, silly voice, “The Holocaust eez ma life!”

  Friday nights were reserved for Shabbat dinner, served in a dining room that smelled of baked chicken and salty kugel. While his children wiggled in torn leather chairs, Stutman would sing in Hebrew, resting his hands on their shoulders.

  “Yevarechecha adonai ve-yishmerecha.” May God bless you and keep you.

  But some nights, long after dark, he’d crawl into bed and cry. Suzanne knew that her husband believed in divine justice as much as he did God and family.

  “You’re trying to make things right,” she’d whisper, kissing his wet eyelashes until he fell asleep.

  WITHOUT A DOUBT, the eyewitness statements would help forge a legal case against Jakob Reimer. But Stutman almost wished he had never seen them, the words that twisted themselves into images and lodged deep in his gut, a chronic condition.

  Stutman thought about the man he would soon take to federal court. Some months after the interview with Rosenbaum and Sher, Reimer had appeared in his bedroom slippers on the front porch of his house in Lake Carmel and complained to a reporter from New York Magazine who was planning a story about the case.