Unmasked

By Jon D. Hull

THE TRIAL OF IVAN THE TERRIBLE

by Tom Teicholz

St. Martin's Press; 354 pages

$22.95

Two questions haunt the case of John Demjanjuk. Is he really "Ivan the Terrible," operator of the gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp in Poland during 1942-43? And if so, how is it that a retired Cleveland autoworker with a spotless record as a churchgoing citizen and loving family man was also capable of murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews, stabbing and mutilating his victims even as he marched them to their deaths?

Author Tom Teicholz, a New York City attorney who quit his job to attend Demjanjuk's 17-month-long trial, confines himself to the first question, offering a compelling account of the evidence and courtroom drama that led to Demjanjuk's death sentence in 1988 by an Israeli court. Stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 for lying about his past, the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was extradited in 1986, becoming the first Nazi war criminal to be tried in Israel since Adolf Eichmann was convicted in 1961 and hanged in 1962.

The accusations, based on the testimony of five survivors of Treblinka, etch a ghastly portrait of one of the bloodier cogs in the Nazi machinery: a man who forced Jewish laborers to have sex with corpses and relished the cries of his victims as they were stabbed, shot and gassed. Of the 870,000 Jews transported to the camp, fewer than 50 are believed to have survived.

The trial centered on the accuracy of those memories -- more than four decades later -- as well as the validity of a German-issued identity card supplied by the Soviet Union. Though Teicholz persuasively unravels Demjanjuk's alibi (he claims he was a German prisoner of war at the time), the author handles the task a bit too eagerly, often telling the reader what to make of the evidence, which piles up "like the corpses in the pit." In fact, some observers express lingering doubts about whether Demjanjuk was really Ivan the Terrible.

Teicholz wisely refrains from leading his own tour into the dark terrain of Demjanjuk's mind. "Demjanjuk had given abstract evil a human face," he writes. Only Demjanjuk's victims can describe what it looked like when the mask was removed.