Two faces of a WWII case

SUTTON - There are two Vladas Zajanckauskases.

One was a high-ranking noncommissioned officer in a Nazi training camp who took part in one of the most heinous massacres of World War II, the 1943 liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. He lied about his war record to enter the United States. The blood of thousands of Jews is on his hands. So says the US Justice Department about Zajanckauskas, a 91-year-old Lithuanian-born factory worker who came to Central Massachusetts after the war and has lived here for almost 60 years.

The other is the Zajanckauskas his family and friends know. He is a good and decent man, a role model for kindness, a devout Catholic who himself suffered at the hands of the Germans. He is honest and compassionate and patriotic, worked hard all his life, and is devoted to his family. A man about whom a terrible mistake has been made.

Since that summer day in 2002 when a US marshal knocked on his door to serve him with papers, Zajanckauskas and his family say their lives have been a nightmare. In 2005 a federal district court judge revoked his US citizenship on the basis that he'd lied about where he'd been during the war on his immigration documents when he entered the country in 1950. Last month a federal immigration judge ordered Zajanckauskas deported to Lithuania, concluding he played an active role in the Nazi plan to exterminate Jews in Warsaw.

Zajanckauskas and his family are appealing the ruling, which would make him the oldest person ever deported as a result of an investigation by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations.

To OSI officials, this is a story of justice served, a textbook case of a Nazi collaborator who managed to quietly live out his life in the United States but whose misdeeds caught up with him. A story of a man with a defense they've heard before, many times - wasn't there, didn't do it - whose deportation order honors their commitment to Congress and to Holocaust survivors to remove such people from this country, no matter the cost.

"It is essential to send the message that people who participate in crimes against humanity will find no sanctuary in the US," says Eli M. Rosenbaum, who heads the OSI's criminal division, which has been tracking Nazi war criminals in the United States since 1979. Since 2004, the OSI's mission has expanded to include the pursuit of criminals involved in more recent genocides, such as those in Cambodia and Rwanda. "Anyone who dares to contemplate participating in such crimes should know they may be pursued until they take their last, dying breath."

To his family, it's a David-and-Goliath legal battle that has Zajanckauskas as the guileless little guy, a frail, old man who worked for 35 years in a Worcester plastics factory and who has no hope of effectively defending himself without any living witnesses to speak up for him. A battle full of legal ambiguity that has cost him $200,000 in legal bills, forced him to sell his house in Millbury, and taken a crushing toll on his health and that of his 81-year-old wife, Vladislava.

Deporting him would be "cruel and unusual punishment," his daughter Diane Lavoie wrote in April in a letter to US Immigration Judge Wayne R. Iskra. "Throughout my life I haven't ever seen anything of a negative nature in his character. He does not like to see any manner of suffering, even to seeing a dog tied or penned up and not free." For this elderly man to be deported "would be utterly devastating not only for them [her parents], but for the entire family. Where would they go? Who would care for them? . . . We do not know how many days they have left with us."

Support from neighbors

"Welcome to Grandma and Grandpa's . . . Open 24 hours," reads a folksy wooden sign outside his home. He sold his own house four years ago, and he and his wife moved into a cottage on property owned by his daughter, a short walk from her own house on Sutton's scenic Lake Singletary. Lavoie's well-groomed gardens surround the house, morning glory vines embrace the entryway trellis, and a statue of the Madonna stands in the garden.

Zajanckauskas is a slight, soft-spoken man with a kindly manner. On the walls of his home hang family photos - the couple have three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren - and some of his own artwork. He tends a small garden and passes his time these days by reading presidential biographies and newspapers on his computer in five languages - German, Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, and English. He says he's received many supportive cards and letters from people in the community. "You have our total support now and always," reads one card from a neighbor. "Please don't ever lose hope."

He has also recently completed a 99-page memoir, "My Bits of Life in This Beautiful World," which describes his childhood and wartime experiences. He says he wrote it for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, though recalling the details of his difficult war years often made him cry. "I want to show them what war is doing to humanity," he says in accented, imperfect English, while his wife cries softly nearby. "They would know what it means."

Zajanckauskas's version

The story he tells in the memoir is a very different one from that told by the government and summarized by Judge Iskra in a 41-page written decision issued Aug. 2. Zajanckauskas's version depicts a young man born in Lithuania who got swept up in political and historical crosscurrents he was helpless to resist. In 1939 he joined the Lithuanian military, which became part of the Soviet Army after the Soviet annexation of Lithuania in 1940. He was captured by the Germans in 1941 and held in a German prisoner-of-war camp where he was whipped, starved, and exposed to typhus. "People started dying like flies; hundreds and hundreds a day!" he wrote. He lost his hair and his hearing and was reduced to skin and bones. He was recruited for German military service and in 1943 was sent to the Trawniki Training Camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

It is Zajanckauskas's version of the Trawniki period that is most at odds with the Justice Department's account. Zajanckauskas writes in his memoir that he was assigned to work in the canteen and kitchen and to be a translator. His job was hard. The Germans were cruel and shot those who tried to escape, yet he was allowed to visit a nearby village initially to buy eggs "because the Germans were crazy about them." Soon, he was going on leaves for other reasons. On one, he met his future wife; on another he was allowed to visit his ill father in Lithuania. He got a promotion from the Germans, and in February 1944 he was allowed three days off to be married. In July, German forces evacuated the camp; after the war, the Zajanckauskases lived in Austria and in 1950 came to the United States, where he had relatives.

The fact that the Nazi war machine was exterminating Jews on a mass scale is only hinted at; he suggests he had only limited knowledge of what the Germans were doing. When his future wife's family told him that behind the camp's tall stone wall there was another camp "only for Jews," he writes: "I was so surprised that the Germans didn't tell anybody in the camp about this."

He places himself in the canteen in mid-April 1943, which is when the Germans began their assault on the Warsaw Ghetto, an operation that triggered an armed uprising and led to the extermination of more than 50,000 Jews.

"Starting the middle of April I saw through the window of the canteen that new people [civilian] young guys were coming . . . Young civilian men were coming almost every day and almost every day groups of trained men were also leaving," he writes in the memoir. "I had no idea where they were going or what they were doing and I couldn't find out because the Germans in the canteen didn't talk much about it."

Another scenario

Eli Rosenbaum says he is lying. "The Warsaw Ghetto liquidation was one of the most notorious crimes of the Holocaust, and he was part and parcel of that monstrous operation." He says the Trawniki training camp was run by the Nazi SS and German police for a single purpose: "It was a school for mass murder, where the Nazis trained men to take part in actions against Jews, rounding them up, herding them off to death and slave labor camps, and also killing them outright."

He says Zajanckauskas's name appeared on a roster of 351 men deployed to the ghetto, a document captured by the Red Army during the war and made available to historians in the mid-1990s. He says records show Zajanckauskas was a midlevel noncommissioned officer and thus one of the highest ranking men from Trawniki deployed to Warsaw.

There is no doubt, he says, that Zajanckauskas was among them. The accuracy of the record was confirmed by "hundreds of other pieces of documentation related to the assignment of Trawniki men to outside deployments," says Peter Black, senior historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who testified in the case.

Zajanckauskas was stripped of his citizenship two years ago, Rosenbaum notes, because he was found by a federal judge to have lied on immigration documents when he entered the United States, saying that he had worked on a farm until 1943. He also falsified his wife's place of birth on her visa application - she was born in Trawniki - to hide his service to the Nazis.

Family is behind him

Zajanckauskas maintains his innocence. "I have never been to Warsaw," he says firmly.

Both his daughter, Diane Lavoie, and granddaughter Denise Ronayne, stand by him. They acknowledge that he was not truthful on his immigration documents, but they say he was heeding the advice of an immigration official in Europe who helped the displaced fill out paperwork.

They say that despite the fact that his name is on the roster, there is no actual proof, no witness, to say he was there and that they believe him when he says he stayed behind in the canteen.

"Why would they take the only guy at the head of the canteen who fed everybody? The roster is the only shred of evidence they have against him," says Ronayne. "There are times when orders get changed. They could have inadvertently put his name on it."

She says the government could have prosecuted him long ago but waited until potential witnesses died off. She says she believes that the OSI is "fizzling out" now that so many perpetrators are dying and that they are going after her grandfather because "they are trying to justify their own existence." She adds: "I almost feel like there is a witch hunt going on."

They were shocked when the judge ordered him deported and say Zajanckauskas did not defend himself as well as he could have. "My grandfather is a very sweet man," says Ronayne. "He is a gentleman and agreeable and not a fighter. When the time came to defend himself against the allegations, what do you say except, 'I was never there?' "