Nazi Hunter (64 page)

Under questioning, he said he had known both victims. One was Sara Fermeinska, about twenty-six, and the other was named Secholovic, about thirty. He added that when it became known he had
witnessed their deaths, he was called out from his barracks and given twenty-five lashes across the back.

On another occasion, Kaufman was on a detail carrying lumber. Coming upon a group of women collecting stones and lumber for the men to haul, they stopped to chat. This was unheard of in Majdanek
and the guards sounded an alarm. ‘Mrs Braunsteiner came along,’ said Kaufman, ‘and when she saw, she started using her whip again and killed two other ladies.’

In June 1942, Kaufman and other ‘horses’ were hauling food from the kitchen to the women’s camp, about a kilometre away. At the gate, however, they were blocked. ‘Three
or four hundred ladies were there,’ he related. ‘Mrs Braunsteiner was telling the ladies they would have to give their children away because the children were going to a summer camp
where they would get milk two times a day. The mothers didn’t want to give up their children because they knew what would happen. Mrs Braunsteiner started hitting one woman with a child so
long the woman fell down. The
lady was dead and the child was dead. We had to move them aside and then get our wagons in.’

Kaufman withstood several hours of cross-examination by defence attorney Barry, who asked him if he was seeking revenge.

‘No,’ said Kaufman. ‘I’m just interested in the truth.’

‘The truth,’ said lawyer Barry, ‘is just what I’m after.’

‘
Erev Rosh Hashanah
,’
⁶⁸
said Kaufman, ‘it must be the truth.’

Barry hadn’t finished cross-examining the witness on his painful testimony when the hearing adjourned for a fortnight (instead of the scheduled one-week interval) to avoid confrontation
with a rally against Mrs Ryan outside INS headquarters. The protest had been announced by a group called the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization. When the hearing did reconvene, Kaufman did not
reappear. He had suffered a heart attack and was too sick to testify. This, of course, worked to the defence’s advantage: Mrs Ryan had not been given a full chance to confront her accuser. .
.

Other witnesses, too, reported strange and sinister happenings after testifying. Eva Konikowski received neatly typed postcards warning that ‘dirty Jewish witnesses will be killed.’
The day after another survivor, Nuna Wiezbicka, testified, there was a knock on her door. When she looked through the peephole, she saw a man wearing a ski mask and hissing, ‘Witness . . .
witness . . . witness.’ Mary Finkelstein identified Mrs Ryan as Braunsteiner from an old photo and testified that she’d seen her ‘clobber’ a woman inmate of Majdanek to the
ground and scream, ‘You pig! You God damn Jew! Stand up straight!’ According to Mrs Finkelstein, ‘she dropped and didn’t get up – ever.’ When Mrs Finkelstein
returned to her home in Brooklyn, the phone was ringing. A man’s voice informed her that ‘all Jews will some day be killed.’

That 17 September, thanks to the Ryan hearings, Majdanek Day, the annual return of Polish and other European survivors, was covered by the international press for the first time. Hanna
Mierzejewska – a survivor of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück as well as Majdanek who was working at the American school in Warsaw – led reporters past the brooding Stalin Gothic war
memorial, drab barracks, rusted barbed wire, and barren fields to ‘the real Majdanek memorial’: a mound of earth containing the ashes and bones of
more than
18,000 Jews who were murdered there in one day: Sunday, 3 November 1943, when Hermine Braunsteiner was still stationed at Majdanek.
⁶⁹

The victims, she said, were ‘our Jews and those from two other camps near Lublin. . .’ Pointing to a grassy field that stops at the edge of industrial Lublin, she said: ‘They
were ordered to run down that slope. As they reached the ditches, they were shot with machine-guns. They didn’t want the rest of us to hear, so the loudspeakers were turned up and played
music all day.’

When she arrived at Majdanek in January 1943, Mrs Mierzejewska – known as ‘Pant Hanka’ – was chosen as a block leader because she spoke German. In that capacity, she
matched wits with Hermine Braunsteiner almost every day: hiding children and sick and elderly women, for which she was often whipped over barbed wire. For the lives she saved and example she set,
she was awarded her country’s highest civilian decoration, the Poland Reborn medal.

James Feron, who was there for the
New York Times
, reported that when the name of Braunsteiner was raised, the recollections came reluctantly, for the survivors went to this annual
reunion ‘to greet each other rather than to recall the horrors of this place.’ But one woman told him: ‘Yes, I remember Braunsteiner. We feared her most of all. She was a big
woman [who] used her whip a lot.’ Another said that the camp’s woman commandant had been captured, tried, and executed by the Poles. Other subordinates had also been extradited to
Poland.

A Warsaw woman dentist, Dr Danuta Czaykowska-Medryk, fifty-one, said she was saving her memories for the following week in New York. She was flying there to testify against Mrs Ryan. The case
against her was entering a new phase. With Wiesenthal’s intervention, an Iron Curtain country was not only supplying evidence, but also allowing residents to travel to the West.

Dr Czaykowska-Medryk and Dr Suzanne Weinstein Lambolez, a Parisian physician, both arrived in New York on 19 September 1972. INS had provided plane tickets and promised them $37 a day in
expenses, barely the price of a ratty New York City hotel room. Upon landing, however, they were told the federal funds for their
stay had not yet cleared. With the
stop-and-start schedule of hearings and possible recalls, INS wasn’t finished with them until early November. To keep them afloat financially, investigator DeVito passed a hat around the
fourteenth floor of the INS building, where he worked, and raised $604. The government’s expense money didn’t clear until 9 November, the day before the witnesses left the country.

DeVito was convinced that Nazis infiltrated the federal bureaucracy and even INS to put obstacles in his witnesses’ way. He cited a call his wife, Frieda, received during the hearings.
Speaking German in a calm, unctuous voice, the caller asked her why she was letting her husband hunt Nazis. Didn’t she know this could be dangerous? After all, hadn’t she been born in
Germany and lived through the war there? The DeVitos’ phone was unlisted and he felt that ‘only someone in the Service’ would also have known that his wife was German.

In any event, the two women’s trips proved valuable. Slender, pretty, and blonde, Dr Czaykowska-Medryk wasn’t Jewish, but Catholic, and had written a book about her resistance to
Nazism and the life it had brought her in the camps. In February 1943, a month after she arrived in Majdanek, she was on a detail of women who’d been ordered to carry sand and bricks.
‘Overseer Braunsteiner came over with a dog,’ she testified, ‘and made us run by using a whip. She beat us with the whip . . . She had a cape over her uniform and a dog. I
remember distinctly because she was the first woman with a dog. It was a police dog, not muzzled, but held on a leash . . . On her command, the dog would jump towards the prisoners.’

Later that month, on a similar detail, she encountered Braunsteiner again: ‘She used the whip and a bat against our legs to make us move faster.’ Braunsteiner, she added,
didn’t need whip, dog, or bat to be a brute. She kicked the witness and other inmates so hard and so often with her steel-studded heavy leather boots that they nicknamed her ‘The Mare
of Majdanek’.

‘Did you ever see a woman bitten by the dog?’ lawyer Barry asked blandly. No, she hadn’t.

Did she ever see Mrs Ryan kill anyone? To Barry’s usual question, the answer was no. But Dr Czaykowska-Medryk had, in August 1943, seen her help select Jewish women for the gas chambers:
‘On that day, some Polish women were pulling Jewish women away,
trying to hide them. Braunsteiner ran to one of those women who wanted to hide a Jewish woman and kicked
and beat her.’

Later that August, she saw Braunsteiner grab children and throw them on to two trucks for delivery to the gas chambers. ‘One policewoman refused to help,’ she said, ‘and
Braunsteiner hit her across the face.’

The witness testified in Polish, but the INS special inquiry officer, Francis J. Lyons, had difficulty understanding the interpreter’s English, so he sent for another translator and
recessed the hearing until after lunch. The delay, the change of translators, and the ominous presence of her one-time tormentor all served to unnerve the Polish woman dentist.

In the afternoon, she was asked whether she could identify Braunsteiner. Pointing to Mrs Ryan, she said: ‘The moment I walked in, I recognized her.’

‘Easy to say,’ Mrs Ryan remarked to her husband.

Hearing that voice after nearly thirty years, the witness turned pale and, after examination by a nurse, was sent home for the day. When the hearing resumed three days later, she was
cross-examined by lawyer Barry, who asked her whether she had expressed any concern for the Jewish women in another part of Majdanek.

‘I never asked,’ she answered. ‘Just to ask might bring them closer to death. I was concerned about the few Jews I knew. We were all feeing death together.’

‘Did you hate Jewish women in the field?’ Barry persisted.

‘You are trying to make an anti-Semite out of me!’ she responded indignantly. The most that Barry was able to show ‘against’ her was that she’d been approached to
testify by the US Embassy in Warsaw and that she’d said yes without consulting her husband. Great emphasis was placed by the defence on Russell Ryan’s sitting beside his wife at every
hearing. The most that Barry was able to show ‘for’ his client was the witness’s labelling Braunsteiner the ‘second cruellest guard’ in the camp. Top
‘honours’, she said, went to a woman named Lotte.

That night, lawyer Barry suffered an attack of bleeding ulcers and the hearings were suspended indefinitely.

When they resumed in early October, the French Dr Lambolez gave a glimpse of Braunsteiner at the peak of her career: as head of her own slave labour camp at Genthin, near Ravensbrück,
toward
the end of the war. Testifying that she saw her mistreat inmates on many occasions, she said: ‘I watched her administer twenty-five lashes with a riding-crop to
a young Russian girl suspected of having tried sabotage. Her back was full of lashes, but I was not allowed to treat her immediately.’

‘From October 1972 until March 1973,’ recalls ex-prosecutor Allan Ryan, ‘not a witness was heard, not a day of trial held. The case against the Mare of Majdanek sat on a table
in an empty courtroom.’ He described its status as ‘mired’.

At the European end, however, Simon Wiesenthal was slogging through the mire by prodding Polish and German authorities with his evidence, the hearings’ evidence, and hundreds of names of
witnesses. On 19 March 1973, Poland asked for Mrs Ryan’s extradition to stand trial for participation in gas-chamber selections of women and children at Majdanek. While Barry’s law firm
was arguing that this was political persecution by a communist regime that could not and would not give their client a fair trial, West Germany upstaged everybody two days later by formally issuing
a warrant for her extradition as a fugitive accused of murder.

This took the case out of the INS hearing-room in Manhattan and back into federal court in Brooklyn. Mrs Ryan was arrested and spent her first night in jail on Rikers Island in the East River.
When she appeared in court at a hearing for bail, she complained that she had ‘slept with prostitutes’. Bail was denied, but she was transferred to the less demeaning Nassau County Jail
on Long Island.

Events now moved swiftly and dramatically. The West German warrant, citing nine instances in which ‘Hermine Ryan, née Braunsteiner’ had played a role in murder or torture at
Majdanek, and accusing her of taking part in the consignment of as many as a thousand Jews at a time to death in gas chambers, was followed by a three-hundred-page document of depositions detailing
her offences. The first ninety-two pages were made public in English translation by US Attorney Robert Morse on 9 April.

‘In the fall of 1942, or the following winter,’ the indictment began slightly fuzzily, ‘the accused hit an unknown female prisoner on her head and body in such a way that she
collapsed and died a day or two later because of her injuries.’

During that period, it went on, ‘not only did she push prisoners selected by other SS members into the group destined for the gas
chambers, but those who argued for
exemption because they were still capable to work were rendered useless by means of lashes or cuts with the whip.’

In September 1943, swore Maria Kaufmann-Krasowski in a deposition, a Jewish girl tried to escape the gas chamber by pretending she was a Gentile. Braunsteiner knew better – and, to set an
example for her other prisoners, ordered a special roll-call. Beneath an improvised gallows, she placed a three legged stool. Then an SS man named Enders led the girl in.

‘On the way to the gallows,’ the witness had testified, ‘I had to translate Enders’ questions . . . as to whether she was aware that she was to be hanged. She answered
that she was aware of it. As the noose was slipped around her neck, she turned to the crowd that was forced to watch and said in Polish: “Remember me.”

‘There was a great silence. Then Enders pushed away the stool and hanged the girl. Braunsteiner stood right next to the gallows during this hanging. Then the Germans went away. Somebody
threw some flowers on the body, and it was taken away . . . All of us went quietly to our barracks, and in my barracks people were praying.’

Russell Ryan was in court. He embraced his wife whenever she was brought in or taken away. ‘They talk about crimes against humanity and human dignity,’ he declared. ‘I think
this entire case is a tremendous outrage.’ He vowed to ‘stick with her to the very end’ and follow her to Germany, if necessary.