[2019] Citizen 865 Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Debbie Cenziper

  Cover design by Jeff Miller/Faceout Studio

  Cover images: Houses © Photo by H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/

  Getty Images; Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp © Jonathan Noden-

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  Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Map of Eastern Europe courtesy of Worth Chollar

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  First Edition: November 2019

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  ISBNs: 978-0-316-44965-6 (hardcover), 978-0-316-44966-3 (ebook)

  E3-20191022-DA-NF-ORI

  E3-20190925-DA-NF-ORI

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The Dance

  Part One: Occupied Poland 1941–1943 Chapter One: The Shtetl of Zolochiv

  Chapter Two: The Color of Blood

  Chapter Three: The Wedding

  Part Two: United States 1978–1992 Chapter Four: Proper Work

  Chapter Five: Darkness Comes My Way

  Chapter Six: Light at Long Last

  Chapter Seven: Breach of Power

  Chapter Eight: God’s Grace

  Chapter Nine: Secrets and Lies

  Chapter Ten: Sunrise in Prague

  Chapter Eleven: Code for Murder

  Chapter Twelve: Seven Floors Above Manhattan

  Part Three: Poland and the United States 1941–1951 Chapter Thirteen: Health and Welfare

  Chapter Fourteen: Courage and Devotion

  Chapter Fifteen: Amchu?

  Chapter Sixteen: Good Fortune

  Part Four: United States 1996–2013 Chapter Seventeen: Long After Dark

  Chapter Eighteen: Winter in Penza

  Chapter Nineteen: The Work of Murder

  Chapter Twenty: Taken Up

  Chapter Twenty-One: Compassion

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Second Chances

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Credible Evidence

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Trawniki

  Epilogue: Feels Like Vindication

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Notes

  Photos

  More Praise for Citizen 865

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  Author’s Note

  At a crowded holiday party in 2016, I met a lawyer from the US Department of Justice. Over a long conversation, Robin Gold described the history and mission of a unit deep inside the massive federal agency that had raced against time to track, identify, and bring to justice Nazi perpetrators found in America’s cities and suburbs in the years after World War II. For three decades, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) pursued a series of high-profile cases against concentration camp guards, police leaders, Nazi collaborators, and propagandists. I found one lesser-known investigation particularly compelling: the search for the men of Trawniki.

  Citizen 865 is a story about darkness but also about light, the pursuit of truth by a team of American Nazi hunters that worked to expose the men behind the most lethal operation in the Holocaust. Year after year, the team scrambled to hold these collaborators accountable for their crimes, not only for those who had perished in the war but also for those who had survived, and for the benefit of a world that too often finds itself in the exact same place more than seventy years later, forced to explain bigotry, hate, and mass murder.

  This book is a work of nonfiction based on hundreds of hours of interviews with historians and federal prosecutors and thousands of pages of government documents, Nazi rosters and records, scholarly research, trial transcripts, and court filings. Most of the documents came from the US Department of Justice and the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which provided access to several dozen boxes of papers, articles, and records donated in 2015 by former OSI historian Peter Black.

  Additional research was conducted in the archives and museums of Prague, Warsaw, and Lublin, Poland. Court transcripts, records, and interviews with those who had direct knowledge of conversations allowed me to reconstruct the dialogue in this book.

  At the request of family members, the Polish names of survivors Feliks Wojcik and Lucyna Stryjewska have been used. Taped interviews spanning a decade and on-the-ground research in Lublin, Warsaw, and Vienna allowed me to chronicle their wartime journeys.

  I also traveled to Trawniki, Poland, where Nazi leaders in the early years of the war recruited a loyal army of foot soldiers. Some of these men would eventually make their way to the United States and live undetected for years, ordinary Americans with extraordinary secrets.

  Their lies unraveled under the unflinching glare of history and through the work of men and women who refused to look away.

  It speaks well of American justice that it will not close the books on bestiality until the last participant has felt a frisson of fear and is routed from the land of the free.

  George F. Will, the Washington Post, 1998

  Prologue

  The Dance

  New York City

  1992

  Nazi recruit 865 ducked into the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, rode the elevator to the seventh floor, and sat down in a hushed conference room, where three federal prosecutors were waiting. He smiled, a practiced smile, the smile of an old friend. Tufts of silver hair were combed neatly over his ears, and a mustache grown long ago straddled a thin upper lip. He was lean from years of careful eating and late nights spent in the dance halls of Munich after the war, gliding across the floor to music that reminded him of home.

  “Ready?” one of the lawyers asked.

  He nodded, clear-eyed and steady, and raised his right hand. “I affirm to tell the truth.”

  His eastern European accent had softened over the years, and the words sounded lyrical, a light and mellow promise. He was an obliging helper who had come when he was called, traveling all this way from a modest frame house on the shoreline of Lake Carmel, sixty miles upstate, where retirement waited on a spit of a beach and in the faded blue dinghies that bobbed along the water.

  Even his name was benign, shortened
to three quick beats decades earlier when he had stood before an American flag and vowed to defend the Constitution. Jakob Reimer, the newest citizen of the United States, had given himself a new name. Jack.

  “We could do this in another language, such as German, if you prefer,” the lawyer offered.

  “No, no,” Reimer replied. Before these new friends, he would share a great secret. “To tell the truth, I used to read and write German.…Now I have forgotten.”

  From across the table, Eli Rosenbaum managed a slight smile. Years earlier, he had questioned a Polish man who once kept meticulous count of how many bullets he had used to kill Jews during a roundup in the war. At the start of the interview, Rosenbaum shook the man’s hand and mused to himself that he had earned his annual government salary in that single moment, forced to make pleasantries with a murderer.

  Rosenbaum had investigated and prosecuted dozens of Nazi perpetrators since then, concentration camp guards and police leaders who had slipped into the United States with bogus stories about war years spent on farms and in factories, far removed from the killing squads and annihilation centers of occupied Europe. But the case against Reimer was different.

  Soon, the US Department of Justice would move to expose one of the most trusted and effective Nazi collaborators discovered on American soil, an elite member of a little-known SS killing force so skillfully deployed in occupied Poland that 1.7 million Jews had been murdered in less than twenty months, the span of two Polish summers.

  It was midmorning in New York, and on the streets outside, city workers lingered in the sun. But inside the US Attorney’s Office, in the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge, Rosenbaum felt as if time had given way, stretching and shrinking, as he peered at the seventy-three-year-old retired potato chip salesman who had once vowed to bring Nazi racial order to the occupied East.

  “I would like to have this go as smoothly as possible,” Rosenbaum said. “But I will need the truth, Mr. Reimer, all right?”

  “Look, Mr. Rosenbaum,” Reimer replied. “Let me say this. My wife says to me, ‘You always preach we should love the Jewish people and you are being picked on.’ I say, ‘You got to understand. If six million Polish people were innocently killed, you would feel the same way as the Jewish people feel.’ Any way I can help, I will be glad to help.”

  It was a serene dance, and Rosenbaum decided to play along. “All you have to do is tell me exactly what happened. That is how you can help, and I think that is how you can help yourself as well.”

  Rosenbaum produced Reimer’s visa application, stamped by US immigration authorities in Germany in 1952. Reimer was quiet as he studied the document, and Rosenbaum watched for flashes of fear or regret. But Reimer looked like a babysitter, not a killer.

  He had lied with ease for years, hiding in plain sight in middle-class America, and now he had American sons and an American wife, a church, a Social Security card, a two-story house in the hamlet of Lake Carmel, population eight thousand. Time had been good to Reimer, every new year, every new decade, distance from a loaded rifle and a uniform bearing the stripes of a first sergeant.

  But now Rosenbaum knew better. Seven stories above Manhattan, four thousand miles from Poland and forty-seven years after the end of the war, Rosenbaum was quite certain that the man sitting before him had once been part of one of the most diabolical operations in the Holocaust.

  He studied Reimer.

  “The Trawniki camp,” Rosenbaum said carefully, “that was an SS training camp…right?”

  Part One

  Occupied Poland

  1941–1943

  Chapter One

  The Shtetl of Zolochiv

  Eastern Poland

  1941

  Go east, his father had said, since there was no place left to run. Pass the synagogue on Jateczna Street and the candy shop in Old Town, pass the school buildings and the tenement buildings with windows of white lace. Pass the stone benches where old Polish men sit and whisper and the farms and fields that stretch for miles, slicked by winter’s first frost.

  Go east toward the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Go east and go far.

  Nineteen-year-old Feliks Wojcik had fled on a bicycle with only a carton of cigarettes for trading and pedaled for ten days to Lwow, a medieval city of green-domed churches that in the fall of 1939 had fallen under Soviet occupation. In the historic region of Galicia, Feliks enrolled in medical school, busing tables for food and mingling with other Jewish students who had also escaped to eastern Poland, to a town without German soldiers, where it was supposed to be safe.

  For many months, Feliks had thought of his mother, Sophie, who once fancied young Feliks a musical protégé, wedging cork between his fingers so that his tiny hands could span the octaves of his first violin. How long since he had slept in his rambling house in Lublin, filled with family and classical music and the smell of fresh onion rolls, nearly two decades without hunger or pain?

  In the bustling city southeast of Warsaw, his father had gone to night school to become an architect, and the family settled into a grand apartment house outside the cramped Jewish quarter, where shoemakers and carpenters of more meager means squeezed into narrow houses, hauling water by the bucket from an old stone well. Other young Jews in Lublin grew up fearing flashes of antisemitism, homemade weapons fashioned from rocks or gnarled sticks, suitable for a serious beating.

  But Feliks, at five foot nine, with a slender face, deep green eyes, and an impish half grin, had lived in a far more assimilated world, studying French and Latin in a Polish-Catholic high school that his father had helped build.

  “What do you think of my son being considered as a student in your school?” his father, Samuel, had once asked the bishop. “Would it be possible for him?”

  “Of course it would be possible,” the bishop had replied and then arranged for a Jewish professor to visit weekly so that the school’s only Jewish pupil would have the chance to learn his own history, the customs and teachings that had guided generations of families.

  Feliks had spent long, happy evenings performing in a family quartet with his older sister, Sala, who played the piano, an uncle who played the cello, and a cousin who played the viola. He spent summer afternoons on a tennis court and winters on a sled in a park in the city center, near a teeming Jewish market that sold wheat-dough pancakes topped with onion and poppy seeds.

  Once a year his father took him to a prayer house inside a stranger’s living room, but it was stuffy and boring and Feliks wasn’t allowed to eat until sundown. This, he knew, was his father’s duty, a gentle way of showing Feliks what it meant to be a Jew.

  Lublin had fallen early, just weeks after the Germans denounced a nonaggression pact with the Polish government and invaded from the north, south, and west, crushing Polish defense forces. It had been a stunning onslaught, watched across the world, and as tension mounted in Europe, Britain and France two days later declared war on Germany.

  The Germans considered Lublin a strategic acquisition, with a railway that connected the east to the west and more than forty thousand Jews who could repair guns, clear forests, mend shoes, and build the forced-labor camps that under German rule would soon rise across the Polish countryside. There was much to do: Adolf Hitler was looking to create living space for the German people, and Poland provided a rich and bountiful expanse of farmland.

  One night, Feliks’s father had staggered home, beaten by a mob of Germans and Poles. His only son had to escape.

  Jews had lived in Poland since the Middle Ages, but even in Lublin, with two Yiddish newspapers, a Jewish hospital and orphanage, three Jewish cemeteries, twelve synagogues, and the largest rabbinical school in the world, there was no place to hide. There were no friends to help.

  Factories, businesses, and universities were shuttered. Jews had been made to give up their cameras, furs, radios. Gone was the violin that Feliks had once played until his fingers were raw. The Germans had issued a forced-labor decree, rounding up Jews from
across the city for backbreaking work in labor camps.

  It would be safer in the east, Feliks’s parents had reasoned, in one of the Polish cities or towns annexed by the Soviets under a nonaggression pact that Hitler had struck with Joseph Stalin, containing a secret deal to divide up eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

  In the final months of 1939, Feliks had said good-bye to his parents and sister and left the so-called Government General of Poland—a German occupation zone of the newly defeated country, covering much of central, southern, and, eventually, southeastern Poland, including Warsaw and Lublin. He traveled 220 kilometers from home, sneaking across the demarcation line along the winding Bug River. He soon arrived in the Soviet-occupied city of Lwow, settled in the fifth century and home to several hundred thousand Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews.

  He managed to complete nearly two years of medical school, getting by in student housing and dodging the Russian soldiers who were rounding up able-bodied men for work in faraway Soviet coal mines.

  But as the summer of 1941 crept closer, the tenuous state of affairs in Poland was about to grow worse.

  IN JUNE, HITLER directed the German army to carry out a surprise attack against the Soviet Union, his partner in the conquest of Poland. Operation Barbarossa would become one of the largest military operations in modern warfare, launched by Hitler to eliminate the threat of Communism and gain control of land within the Soviet Union.

  In Poland, German soldiers crossed the demarcation line into territories controlled by the Soviets. They soon marched into Lwow, a terrifying sight, and in the bedlam that followed, motley gangs of students stalked the halls of Feliks’s dormitory, searching for Jews. He was pushed to the ground and ordered to scrub the floor of a new pub for German officers.