Sobibor - Holocaust Propaganda And Reality - Unity of Nobility ...

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 385
tember 1986 expressed her unease about the way the Israeli legal authorities
had been handling the Demjanjuk case, she received the following
reply a few weeks later: 1126
“At first I did not want at all to reply, because since the days of
Bogdan Chmelnitzky, the Jewish people has a long score to settle
with the Ukrainian people. […] However, on second thought I
reached the conclusion that an application such as yours, coming
from an American citizen (even though of Ukrainian origin), must
not remain without a response. […] To you and your friends, I suggest
that you go to church not only on Sunday but also every day of
the week, and that you kneel there until bleeding at the knees in asking
forgiveness for what your people has done to ours.”
In defense of Israel we must state, however, that not all of its citizens
approved Ben-Meir’s primitive racial slurs. The writer Avraham
Shifrin, for example, had some very harsh words to say to the Knesseth
president. 1127
During the trial, former detainees from Treblinka took the witness
stand and recited the most sickening horror stories. 1128 The witness
Eliyahu Rosenberg stated under oath: 1129
“I saw him especially when I was working on the ramp every
day, whenever consignments of Jews arrived for extermination. I
saw him when he stood next to the gas chambers at the entrance to
the corridor with a destructive instrument in his possession, such as
a small short iron pipe, and a whip. He also wore a belt with his pistol.
This shouldn’t be so, all the destructive instruments together… I
also saw that he had a dagger, I saw him with these destructive instruments,
and how he would strike, lash, cut… these victims at the
entrance to the gas chambers.… […] They knew how to strike, to
strike. We were already there, at that place, and we got used to the
beatings. But not to the tortures. God almighty, why tortures? Why
cut living flesh from people? Nobody ordered them to do so, no one,
he did it alone, on his own initiative. I never heard any German telling
him to do that… […]
I was there on the ramp. We had removed the bodies from the gas
chambers, Ivan came out of his cabin, he saw how I was standing
1126 H.P. Rullmann, op. cit. (note 1118), pp. 202f.
1127 Ibid., pp. 206 ff.
1128 Cf. the introduction to the present book.
1129 Criminal Case No. 373/86, State of Israel vs. Ivan (John) Demjanjuk, Verdict, pp. 184ff.