SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

386 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
there, the place was full of corpses, he said to me… lower your
trousers… lay down on them… I saw this incident, and in a second I
understood: this was it, I was finished, either by the pipe in his hand
or in another manner. Lefler (one of the German SS men) was standing
there. He was standing and looking. I ran to him, I stood to attention
and said to him (in German): Ivan wants me to have sexual
relations with a dead woman. So then he went up to him and reprimanded
him. Ivan only said to me (in Russian), I’ll give it to you. He
gave it to me and he found the opportunity.”
Eliyahu Rosenberg had a problem, however: it turned out that he had
stated in writing in 1947 while in Vienna: 1130
“The second of August 1943 was set as the day of the revolt. […]
About three-thirty in the afternoon everything was prepared for the
revolt. […] Then one of the water-carriers right then dashed into the
barracks and yelled: ‘Revolution in Berlin.’ This was the signal. […]
Thereupon some people rushed into the barracks of the Ukrainian
guard detachment, where among others also the Ukrainian Ivan was
sleeping, and killed the Ukrainians with shovels.”
As had been generally expected, the Israeli court pronounced the
death sentence in April of 1988, yet it would not be a carried out. Even
at such an early time too many inconvenient incidents had occurred, and
Demjanjuk’s lawyer Y. Sheftel used them as much as he could. (A
gangster had poured acid into Sheftel’s face in late 1988, a few days after
another lawyer of the defense, Dov Eitan, had fallen from a sky
scraper and died from the consequences of this tragic accident.) Sheftel
eventually claimed to have identified the true “Ivan the Terrible,” a certain
Ivan Marchenko who had somehow disappeared.
The name Marchenko had originally been furnished by a former
prostitute from the hamlet of Treblinka, near the camp, who had
counted several of the Ukrainian guards among her clients during the
war, Marchenko being one of them, but Sheftel found more evidence in
the USRR. According to Soviet legal records, a Ukrainian by the name
of Nikolai Shelayev – who had been sentenced to death and shot in
1952 for alleged crimes committed at Treblinka – had allegedly identified
Marchenko as “the operator of the gas chambers at Treblinka.”
Shelayev’s statements were confirmed by other former Treblinka
guards, and an identity card for Marchenko came to light as well.
1130
A photocopy of Rosenberg’s statement is given by H.P. Rullmann, op. cit. (note 1118),
pp. 133ff.