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If Demjanjuk was wrongly convicted in Israel, the trial court's mistake was in relying too heavily on the testimony of five Treblinka survivors, ages 61 to 86. Their identifications, four decades after the events, were made in not entirely neutral circumstances. During the initial investigation, they picked Demjanjuk from a photo spread in which his picture was disproportionately large. They identified him in court after the Israeli media had thoroughly covered his extradition. "Of course the survivors knew who he was supposed to be," says Tom Segev, author of The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. "They'd seen him testify in America." Israel's Supreme Court now knows what the trial court did not: that there were two men, Ivan Demjanjuk and Ivan Marchenko. Judging by photos of the two as young men, they shared a similar round face, protruding ears, almond-shaped eyes and thin lips.
Though Demjanjuk may not be the Ivan of Treblinka, evidence suggests he was a Wachmann elsewhere, notably at the Sobibor death camp in Poland. The Supreme Court could convict him on those charges or order that he be tried anew. However, scant proof exists of what Demjanjuk may have done at the other camps. Such a move would also raise questions of selective punishment, since Israel has never before sought to prosecute ordinary Wachmanner.
Nazi hunters expect any outcome to be bad news for them. The case, says Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's coordinator of Nazi war-crimes research, has seriously challenged the testimonial value of Holocaust survivors and made it "incredibly difficult" to press for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals worldwide. He insists the Wiesenthal Center will not lessen its efforts to bring these criminals to justice. But he will not say whether the organization has made any effort to find Marchenko, the true beast, it would seem, of Treblinka. Marchenko, who was born in 1911, could well be dead. If he is still alive and free, living comfortably in Croatia or Argentina or some American suburb, that would be the greatest travesty of the Demjanjuk affair.