[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  DENATURALIZATION CASES WERE decided by judges, not juries, and on the second day of the Jakob Reimer hearing, expert witness Charlie Sydnor turned to face Judge McKenna from the witness stand.

  From a historian’s perspective, Reimer could have been a Nazi collaborator straight from central casting, an educated ethnic German who had likely understood the German culture far more than he did Russian. Still, Sydnor thought the judge looked doubtful, even bored, sitting with his head in his hands at his desk in the center of the courtroom.

  For many months, Sydnor had worked late into the night with David Rich and Peter Black, who, Sydnor often said, understood OSI defendants all the way down to their fingernails. Stutman was like that too, meticulous and obsessive, an irritant to the mildly exhausted paralegals in the unit who were forced to chase down the most obscure details about the Nazi regime. Had an SS guard at Auschwitz worn size eleven boots? Stutman needed to know.

  Sydnor appreciated the thoroughness. After the impromptu meeting in the men’s room in Charleston with Peter Black and David Marwell in 1980, Sydnor had worked regularly as an expert witness for OSI, testifying in court about concentration camp guards and other Nazi collaborators. Over time, Sydnor discovered that some lawyers considered the historians little more than eccentric scholars, curiosities to be tolerated but never fully empowered.

  Ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag, Sydnor once called a particularly dismissive attorney.

  But Stutman was different. He believed that history was the best evidence of all, with the power to make or break a case rooted in faraway events that were decades old and growing more distant with each passing year.

  In the courtroom in New York, Stutman was asking about Trawniki. “Dr. Sydnor, are you able to say whether…Trawniki men knew or came to know what was happening to the Jews?”

  “It’s very clear that the men initially recruited were not told where they were going,” Sydnor explained. “When the first large-scale, lethal actions were undertaken—and the first one was in Lublin in March of 1942—the official explanation that the participants were given was that the people in Lublin were going to be cleared from the ghetto and shipped out, and they were going to be sent to Palestine or they were going to be relocated in work camps further east. The official explanation given even within the SS was, and the clerical euphemism used was, ‘resettlement to the east.’”

  Sydnor went on. “Pretty soon everybody figured out that something a lot worse than transportation to Palestine or relocation to a labor camp in the east was what was happening to these people, and, of course, the death camps were up and running. Trawniki men who were rotating back and forth from these guard formations in the death camps to the Trawniki camp itself brought back stories with them of what was going on.”

  Sydnor paused. “At a certain point, every Polish child was aware of what was happening to the Jews who were crammed into those trains.”

  Stutman asked Sydnor to describe the training protocol at Trawniki and then turned to shooting operations. “Can you describe any…mass shootings that involved Trawniki men?”

  From survivor accounts from postwar legal proceedings in West Germany, Sydnor knew that Trawniki men had participated in a massacre of Jews in the woods during the Lublin ghetto deportation in the spring of 1942. He believed that the two Soviet eyewitnesses who had placed Reimer at a pit shooting had likely described that massacre, and that Reimer himself, during his 1992 interview with Eli Rosenbaum and Neal Sher, had likely detailed the same operation.

  But Sydnor couldn’t know for sure. Because the conduct of the killers at pit shootings throughout eastern Europe was generally consistent, he decided to describe a shooting in August 1942 when as many as two thousand Jews in a village in the Lublin District were taken to a sports complex and then into the woods, where they were shot in groups.

  “This shooting created something of an administrative stir…because it was very, by German standards, very messy,” Sydnor said. “…The pit had been dug in a location where groundwater seeped into the bottom. The victims were forced to get into the pit and lie down and they were shot. The next group of victims were then forced to lie down on top of the first group and they were shot.…A lot of victims in the pit were only being wounded so that at one point, the Trawniki men who were doing the shooting and some of the Germans actually got down into the pit as the groundwater mixed with the blood of the victims and fired with pistols at short range to finish off those who were only wounded.”

  “These operations sound like they were hard work,” Stutman said softly.

  “Very hard work. Mass murder is hard work, Mr. Stutman.”

  ON THE THIRD day of the hearing, Ramsey Clark pressed Sydnor about the pit shooting that he had described in court. “You have absolutely no reason to believe [Reimer] was there, do you?” Clark asked.

  “I have seen no evidence that he was there, no, sir,” Sydnor replied.

  “Why would you go through all that horror in this man’s case?”

  “Information was given by Mr. Reimer about a shooting.…It is, I think, important in trying to understand the context of the time and the circumstances of German rule in the Lublin District.…Historians simply look for what information or evidence may be available to provide context with other events.”

  “Do you think in a murder trial it would be fair to present evidence [from] other murder trials. What Jack the Ripper did?” Clark asked.

  “I don’t know about a murder trial,” Sydnor said evenly. “But I don’t think there was any intent or effort to either sensationalize or dramatize anything. Certainly, the nature and character of German rule and the behavior of the Trawniki-trained guards…were of such a nature that any courtroom theatrics fifty years after the fact, Mr. Clark, would be pretty superfluous.”

  “But if it was your future that was under consideration, you might not think that testimony was superfluous to your case. You would agree with that?”

  Stutman cut in. “Object to counsel arguing with the witness.”

  “To the last question, sustained,” the judge said.

  “You have no knowledge that he was there, do you?” Clark asked again. “He may have been, but you have no knowledge of it?”

  “He may have been. All I have are the statements, the recollections of [the two eyewitnesses], each of whom testified that they participated in a killing operation involving a pit in the woods…in the spring of 1942. And each of those gentlemen identified a number of people who were present at that event. Both of them identified Mr. Reimer.”

  AFTER COURT, SYDNOR and Stutman met for dinner at Windows on the World on the top of the World Trade Center. The main dining room, which faced north and east, commanded a sprawling view of the Manhattan skyline. Stutman was quiet, staring into his wine glass.

  “What were they thinking?” he murmured.

  Sydnor looked up. He didn’t understand the question. “What?”

  “What were they thinking?” Stutman asked again.

  He seemed to be referring to Reimer and the Trawniki men who had fired into the ravine filled with Jewish people.

  “Well, I—”

  Stutman interrupted. “What do you think was in their minds, in their last thoughts, before they were murdered?”

  Stutman was asking about the victims, not the killers, and Sydnor found the question unexpected and profoundly unsettling. He tried to think of some way to respond, some factoid from history that would explain the roots of inhumanity. He came up empty.

  Stutman went on. “Do you think that a father standing there, holding his infant, in his last thoughts, could he have imagined that one day there would be somebody who would try to effect justice or retribution?”

  Sydnor imagined the ravine filled with parents, children, grandparents, stripped of their dignity and about to die in a hole in the ground. Sydnor wanted to comfort his colleague, to come up with a way to make sense of it all, but he couldn’t find the words.

  Instead
, he stammered, “I can’t imagine, Ned.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Taken Up

  New York City

  1998

  The dreams were back, familiar in the early-morning stillness. Run. She is a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. Hide. There is safety in shadows. For a split second, she can see herself from far away, surrounded by the SS with all the others, but then the light fades, the air returns, and the grisly image finally slips away.

  Sitting next to Ned Stutman on the sixth day of the Jakob Reimer hearing, Ellen Chubin wasn’t the least bit surprised that the nightmares of her childhood had returned, feeding off the testimony in the courtroom. As a girl in Philadelphia she had learned about the Holocaust in part from the experiences of her grandmother’s cousins, a Jewish brother and sister who had fled to Palestine just before the German invasion of Poland. Images of a lost generation crept into Chubin’s dreams and lingered there for years.

  As the junior member of Stutman’s legal team, Chubin had been assigned to prepare two government witnesses, one from the Jewish ghetto in occupied Czestochowa and another from Trawniki. At seventeen, Sophie Degan had been taken to the training camp to sort the belongings of the dead.

  “I haven’t talked about these events ever,” she told Chubin, who listened but didn’t push, just as Stutman had advised her.

  Degan and three other survivors had agreed to share their stories in court. None had known Reimer personally during the war, but for historical context and detail they would describe the work of the Trawniki guards in the cities where Reimer had been deployed.

  In the courtroom, Chubin stole a glance at Reimer, who had stared straight ahead for much of the morning as the first survivor took the witness stand.

  Sixty-eight-year-old Samuel Hilton, an accountant from Arizona, had been a boy of thirteen when the SS ordered every remaining Jew in the Warsaw ghetto to report for deportation. Hilton had crouched in a crowded cellar with his father, but his stepmother and two-year-old sister had stayed behind since a crying toddler would have alerted the Germans. Hilton and his father managed to evade deportation for several months, hiding in bunkers around the ghetto until they were discovered by the SS.

  “We were sure we were going to be shot,” Hilton said. He described standing in a square with his father and the others. “That’s when the indignity started. Well, the SS troops with sticks and bayonets ripped the dresses off the women…beat them, looking for gold, looking for money.

  “They said, ‘If we find any gold or money on you, we will shoot you on the spot.’ And my father had three very beautiful gold bracelets, heavy gold, and I said to him, ‘Dada, please drop it. Drop it.’ So he actually dropped it in the cobblestone.”

  Hilton continued. “They made us sit, and I looked up in the sky. It was a beautiful, blue May day. I looked at my father and I said, ‘What did I do? What did I do to deserve to be killed? I haven’t hurt anyone. I haven’t done anything to no one. Why should I be killed?’…My father stroked my head and he said, ‘What did your little sister, two years old, do to be killed?’ I was a schoolboy and I didn’t know. It was mind-boggling to me.”

  The courtroom was utterly still as Hilton described how the group was taken to a schoolhouse. “That’s where the Ukrainian SS came into play,” he said. “They were swarming that place…from one end to the other.”

  Hilton described beatings with sticks, random and indiscriminate shootings. “I looked out from the window. There were a lot of bodies in the courtyard laying in a pool a blood, a lot of bodies. Then they took women—there was a special room in there. You could hear it, the screaming. That was the rape room, where they used to rape the women.”

  At the prosecutor’s table, Chubin glanced at OSI attorney Lisa Newell, who appeared poised and steady as she questioned Hilton.

  “You stated a moment ago that the Ukrainians came in,” Newell said. “How were you able to recognize these men as Ukrainians?”

  “How do I know?” Hilton replied. “They wore the black coats.…This was all Ukrainian. They didn’t speak German.”

  Hilton described being sent with his father to the Majdanek concentration camp, where relatively strong, healthy men were separated from those who would be quickly killed. Hilton knew he was too young to go with the men, and so he had looked at the SS man in charge and started shouting.

  “I just yelled out, ‘I am sixteen years old, Herr Colonel.’ He was a sergeant, and I called him a colonel. He looked down at me and he smiled and said, ‘You are a kid’…and let me go with the men instead of going to the death.”

  Hilton said his father died a few weeks later at a labor camp near Majdanek.

  “Mr. Hilton, did you ever obtain any further information about the fate of your stepmother and sister?”

  “I looked all over. I am the only one who got out alive.”

  “I have no further questions, Your Honor,” Newell said.

  “No questions, Your Honor,” Reimer’s attorney, Ramsey Clark, said.

  Chubin cleared her throat, gave her head of thick brown curls a gentle shake, and stood up. She wanted to impress Ned Stutman, who reminded her of her father and had once even promised to find a suitable Jewish suitor for Chubin to date and marry. More than anything, however, she wanted to give the survivors a chance to be heard.

  She turned to the judge. “The government calls as its next witness Carl Langner.”

  The retired engineer from Rockland County, New York, walked to the witness stand in a blue jacket and red tie. Looking at Langner, Chubin tried to imagine the boy in Czestochowa who had lost his father to deportations in 1940. Langner, his brother, and his mother had been left to fend for themselves in the Jewish ghetto, on a street that had been called the Avenue of the Holy Madonna until the Germans renamed it Adolf Hitler-Allee.

  “When exactly did the liquidation of the Czestochowa ghetto begin?” Chubin asked.

  “The beginning, just following the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur,” Langner said, staring straight ahead through a pair of square eyeglasses. For a man who had once lost everything, Langner had a voice that was clear and strong.

  “What did you see?” Chubin asked.

  “I saw yelling and screaming and people running trying to escape through the roofs, jumping from the windows, screams, gunshots.”

  “Where were the gunshots coming from?”

  “From the Germans and Ukrainians that tried to kick out the people from their apartment. They did it in such a way that they didn’t have time even to do anything. It was so bad that they had to jump from windows. This period was most horrible, most horrible of all horrors. It was just, I cannot describe. I choke with emotion. How can I express what happened here? You cannot quantify horror.”

  Once, Langner said, he and his brother tried to reach a workshop outside the ghetto, but were turned back by a Trawniki guard. “The Ukrainian…he was singing, whistling. We thought that he is not dangerous. He saw us. He just turned around without a word, cocked his rifle and tried to shoot us.”

  “Who was guarding you?” Chubin asked.

  “We were always guarded mostly by Ukrainian guards.…They were cruel beyond imagination.”

  SOPHIE DEGAN, CHUBIN thought, looked younger than her seventy-one years as she settled onto the witness stand and brushed back her cropped, blond hair. Chubin smiled, hoping to reassure her.

  In November 1943, Degan had been sent to Trawniki with a small group of women to sort belongings left by the thousands of Jewish prisoners who were murdered during Operation Harvest Festival.

  “How were you transported…to Trawniki?” Chubin asked.

  “On tracks because I remember looking and seeing the world,” Degan said. “There were guards, Ukrainian guards sitting with us, and at some point asking us to give all the valuables that we had because we won’t be needing them anymore where we are going.”

  “When they brought you inside the camp, did you see any prisoners?”

  “No, n
obody. That’s what it was, terribly quiet, nothing.”

  “Did you see any signs that there had recently been prisoners in that camp?”

  “Yes, because the barrack there they brought us in, it was like people’s household. They had their household things there, their dresses there, utensils, and everything was pulled out from the platforms that they were sleeping on, like bunk beds.”

  “Bunk beds?”

  “Bunk beds, sort of, and you could see that the place was searched through because the bed things were on the floor. Everything was just upside down. So there were signs that somebody was living there, but nobody was there.”

  “Did you find any survivors of the group who had been at the camp before you arrived?”

  “Later on, as we were clearing all the barracks.…We found at one time a little boy, Marek. He may be two years old. And for a while, they let us keep it, but then they took it away.”

  Jakob Reimer had argued that he was, in most every sense, a prisoner of the SS. Chubin wanted to establish the difference between the Jewish prisoners and the men of Trawniki.

  “When you were at Trawniki…were you issued a uniform?” Chubin asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you receive any pay for your work?”

  “No.”

  “Did you receive any vacation time?”

  “No.”

  “Based upon your experience at Trawniki and your contact with the Ukrainians who were there, was there a difference in the status of the Ukrainians versus the status of the Jews?”

  “Well, they had guns and they were guardians over us. We were prisoners of theirs.”

  “Besides yourself, did any family members survive the war?”

  “Just one single cousin.”

  Chubin nodded at Degan. “Thank you very much.”

  “No questions, Your Honor,” Clark said again.