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World Jewish News
Survivor, 82, gets chance to face down Demjanjuk
09.08.2009
From early childhood to early adulthood, 82-year-old Kurt Gutmann suffered Nazi Germany's pefrsecution of Jews. In October he will get to settle part of the score, as one of the few remaining eyewitnesses in the trial of John Demjanjuk.
Gutmann was born in Germany. As the only Jewish student in a boarding house run by a member of the Nazi SS, his first encounter with the violent anti-Semitism that came with the racist ideology occurred when he was only 11.
Several years later, Gutmann's mother Jeanette and his brother Hans were murdered in the gas chambers of the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, where Demjanjuk allegedly served as a guard and as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 people during the German occupation of the area. A total of 250,000 Jews were killed at the camp.
Gutmann himself escaped their fate. Three years before his family was killed, his mother managed to put her son on one of the trains of the Kiderstransport, which brought Jewish children to Britain during the war, out of the reach of the Nazi murderers. Gutmann returned to Germany after the war.
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, 89, was extradited to Germany from the United States several months ago after years of struggling to escape deportation. He is being held without bail in Munich.
He had emigrated to America in 1952, where he had lived quietly until 1977, when Israel claimed he was a notorious former guard at Treblinka. He was extradited, and Israel convicted him of war crimes and sentenced him to death in 1988, but he appealed and was freed in 1993, after fresh evidence showed he was not Ivan. He then returned to America.
Upon learning about the upcoming trial, Gutmann asked to join the prosecution as an associate prosecutor. The German prosecution picked him and another 11 witnesses out a slew of applicants, most of them relatives of Dutch Jews murdered at Sobibor during Demjanjuk's alleged service there.
"My family supports me," says Gutmann, father to two children and grandfather to five, "but they fear the emotional price I might have to pay." While conceding the issue is "very emotional for him," he adds that he "can speak very clearly as well."
Gutmann says he will tell his family's story at the camp. "I will speak about my mother and brother, about what happened to us. I will speak for the families who have no one left to speak for them," the former translator told Haaretz.
Источник: Haaretz
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