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DETROIT
THE JEWISH NEWS
19 AV 5753/AUGUST 6, 1993
Justice Was Served
Detroiters praise Israel's court for a fair decision
in the Demjanjuk case.
ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM ASSISTANT EDITOR
arry Praw remembers the orches-
tra that played as he and hundreds
of other prisoners began their days
of forced labor, torture and death.
It was a Jewish orchestra orga-
nized by the Nazis to show visitors
what a refined, cultured place the
death camp was. It was an orches-
tra, Mr. Praw says, that "was al-
ways playing your goodbye."
Mr. Praw remembers the place
near the Jewish cemetery in
Poland where the Nazis murdered
much of his family. His three sis-
ters and two brothers perished in
the Holocaust.
What Mr. Praw, of Oak Park,
does not remember is the faces. A
native of Lodz, Poland, he was in
six different death camps — in-
cluding Buchenwald and Bergen-
Belsen — during the war. The camp
guards were rarely Germans; they
were Ukrainians, Latvians,
Estonians.
"I couldn't remember any of their
faces. You could put one of them in
front of me today and say, 'This was
him (a guard)' and still I wouldn't
served as a guard at Sobibor and
other death camps.
Based on this charge, an Israeli
coalition of right-wing groups and
Holocaust survivors quickly filed a
petition calling for further investi-
gation of Mr. Demjanjuk.
The court responded by an-
nouncing on Sunday that it would
delay Mr. Demjanjuk's deportation
for 10 days to determine whether
such an investigation should be con-
ducted.
Mr. Demjanjuk was to have left
on Sunday for his native Ukraine,
which granted him a temporary visa.
know.
"How," he asks, "could anyone re-
member from 50 years ago?"
That's why Mr. Praw was not
shocked by the announcement last
week from Israel's
Supreme Court
that reasonable
doubt exists as to
whether former
Cleveland auto
worker John
Demjanjuk is re-
ally "Ivan the
Terrible." It was a
case built, for the
most part, on the
eyewitness testi-
mony of Treblinka An Israeli guard talks with John Demjanjuk outside his prison cell.
survivors who
said they were
certain Mr. Demjanjuk and "Ivan" He now remains in solitary confine-
were one and the same.
ment in a prison outside Tel Aviv.
Though the court found reason-
The Supreme Court's decision not
able doubt that Mr. Demjanjuk had to convict Mr. Demjanjuk, 73, as
operated the gas chambers at "Ivan" came as a shock to many in
Treblinka, it said ample evidence ex- Israel; survivors throughout the
ists to suggest that he had trained
as an SS guard at Trawniki and JUSTICE page 8
as i de
=
A how-to-survive
workshop gives pointers.
Page 14
Making Capital
A Detroiter gets
an inside look at D.C.
Page 33
Walking The Wire
Learning to juggle
careers and families.
Page 34
Riding High
In The Saddle
CLOSE UP
A new American Jewish Committee
survey shows that half of all American
adults have no idea what the words
"the Holocaust" mean. Some 65 per-
cent could not identify 6 million as the
number of Jews murdered during the
war. A sizable minority are open to the
idea that the Holocaust never oc-
curred.
How could this happen?
Educators from around the state dis-
cuss the complicated issues that come
with teaching the systematic murder
of 6 million Jews.
, Story on page 59
Stand Up
Mending The
Broken Heart
Story on page 50
Bruce. Gold wants audiences
up close and personal.
Page 77
if
Contents on page 3