Protesters say extradite alleged Nazi collaborator
About 200 students and faculty of a Jewish school in New York rallied yesterday outside the Lithuanian consulate in Manhattan, calling on the Baltic state to extradite an 89-year-old retired factory worker from Millbury accused of Nazi war crimes.
Vladas Zajanckauskas, who received a grant of immunity from federal prosecutors in 1981 for testifying against an Illinois man accused of being a guard at a Nazi concentration camp, has lived in the United States since 1950.
He has been accused of helping to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, in which the Nazis executed thousands of Jews.
The protesters, from Rambam Mesivta High School in Lawrence, Long Island, accused Lithuania of lax efforts in bringing war criminals from World War II to justice.
"We ask them to make a statement, once and for all, that they stand against genocide," said Rabbi Zev Friedman, dean of the Mesivta school, who organized the rally. "They should do something about it."
Officials at Lithuania's Embassy in Washington and at the consulate in New York did not return calls.
Reached at his home in Millbury, Zajanckauskas said he rejects the allegations against him. "It's not true," he said. "I have nothing else to say. I got lawyers; talk to my lawyers."
He declined to provide a name or number to contact his lawyers.
At yesterday's protest, Friedman said, students and colleagues chanted, "Do what's right -- extradite!"
They are calling on Lithuania to extradite Zajanckauskas because they see it as a much quicker process than deportation, which Friedman said could be drawn out for years.
In previous interviews with government officials, Zajanckauskas has insisted that he did not participate in the Warsaw Ghetto massacre.
US officials first questioned Zajanckauskas in 1981 and used information from him to prosecute Liudas Kairys, an Illinois man accused of killing Jews at the Treblinka death camp.
In return for his cooperation, prosecutors granted Zajanckauskas immunity from using his words against him.
In the meeting with government prosecutors, Zajanckauskas said his service was limited to serving beer to German soldiers at the Trawniki concentration camp in Poland. Trawniki was a training ground for Eastern European recruits for Operation Reinhard, which led to the deaths of about 1.7 million Jews.
Zajanckauskas told prosecutors that he entered the war as a draftee in the Lithuanian Army, which in 1940 became part of the Soviet Red Army. He said he fled the Soviets near the Latvian border and was captured by the Germans, who forced him and other prisoners to board a train to Trawniki.
There, he told prosecutors, he was ultimately promoted to the SS rank of Zugwachmann, or platoon member.
At the protest yesterday, which was Holocaust Remembrance Day, Rambam Mesivta students read eyewitness accounts from Holocaust survivors, Friedman said.
"It is an outrage the young American servicemen and -women died fighting the Nazis and were unable to return to our great shores, while Nazi war criminals are able to live freely here and collect Social Security," Friedman said.
