Demjanjuk Tells Treblinka Survivor: ‘You Are a Liar’

JERUSALEM — As Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir watched from a front-row seat, accused Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk today spoke out for the first time in court and called a Treblinka death camp survivor a liar.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk interrupted emotional testimony by survivor Eliahu Rosenberg, who, on the edge of tears, described how guards at the Polish camp burned alive a group of prisoners trying to flee gas chambers.

Demjanjuk, 66, a retired auto worker from Cleveland, Ohio, is accused of torturing prisoners and operating the engines of gas chambers that killed more than 850,000 Jews during World War II.

During cross-examination, Rosenberg, 65, shouted and his face turned red as he described an incident when 20 to 30 prisoners tried to knock over a barbed-wire fence to escape.

The attempt failed when guards shot some prisoners. Others were tossed into a nearby gas chamber, where they were burned alive by a lime chloride decomposing chemical that guards sprinkled on their bodies, Rosenberg said.

“Wasn’t there anything you could have done?” Demjanjuk’s chief defense attorney, Mark O’Connor, asked Rosenberg.

“Now I ask the court, in what manner could I have helped them? By screaming? They would have shoved me straight alive into a pit of blood,” Rosenberg said.

“Don’t ask me questions like that, I implore you. You weren’t there. Ask him what would have happened to me,” Rosenberg said, gesturing to Demjanjuk.

At that point, Presiding Judge Dov Levine said he heard Demjanjuk say something. Levine asked O’Connor to repeat Demjanjuk’s words for the court.

O’Connor spoke briefly with his client and then told the court: “He said, ‘You are a liar.’ ”

Shamir, 71, who spent an hour at the dramatic hearing for his first time since the trial reopened Feb. 16, sat silently, listening intently. The Polish-born Shamir lost his parents and other close relatives in the Nazi Holocaust.