Frameshift

Avi Meyer’s father, Jubas Meyer, had been one of the fifty people to escape from the Treblinka death camp. Jubas had lived for three years after the escape, but had died before Avi was born. As a child growing up in Chicago, where Avi’s parents had settled after time in a displaced-persons camp, Avi had resented that his dad wasn’t around. But shortly after his bar mitzvah in 1960, Avi’s mother said to him, “You’re a man now, Avi. You should know what your father went through — what all our people went through.”

And she’d told him. All of it.

The Nazis.

Treblinka.

Yes, his father had escaped the camp, but his father’s brother and three sisters had all been killed there, as had Avi’s grandparents, and countless other people they’d been related to or known.

All dead. Ghosts.

But now, perhaps, the ghosts could rest. They had the man who had tormented them, the man who had tortured them, the man who had gassed them to death.

Ivan the Terrible. They had the bastard. And now he was going to pay.

Avi, a compact, homely man with a face like a bulldog, was an agent with the Office of Special Investigations, the division of the United States Department of Justice devoted to hunting down Nazi war criminals. He and his colleagues at the OSI had identified a Cleveland autoworker named John Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible.

Oh, Demjanjuk didn’t seem evil now. He was a bald, tubby Ukrainian in his late sixties, with protruding ears and almond-shaped eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. And, true, he seemed not nearly as cunning as some reports had made out Ivan the Terrible to be, but, then again, he was hardly the first man to have had his intellect dulled by the passing decades.

The OSI agents had shown photo spreads containing pictures of Demjanjuk and others to Treblinka survivors. Based on their identifications, and an SS identity card recovered from the Soviets, Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship had been revoked in 1981. He’d been extradited to Israel, and now was standing trial for the one capital crime in all of Israeli law.

The courtroom in Jerusalem’s Binyanei Ha’uma convention center was large — indeed, it was actually Hall Two, a theater rented for this trial, the most important one since Eichmann’s, so that as many spectators as possible could see history being made. Much of the audience consisted of Holocaust survivors and their families. The survivors were an ever dwindling number: since Demjanjuk’s denaturalization trial in Cleveland, three of those who had identified him as Ivan the Terrible had passed away.

The judges’ bench was on the stage — three high-back leather chairs, with the one in the center even taller than the other two. The bench was flanked on either side by a blue-and-white Israeli flag. To stage left, the prosecution’s table and the witness box; to stage right, the table for the defense attorneys and, just behind them, the dock where Demjanjuk, wearing an open-necked shirt and blue sports jacket, sat with his interpreter and guard. All the furnishings were of polished blond wood.

The stage was raised a full meter above the general audience seating.

Television crews lined the back of the theater; the trial was being broadcast live.

The trial had been under way for a week. Avi Meyer, there as an OSI observer, whiled away the time waiting for the court to be called to order by rereading a paperback of To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee’s tale had affected him profoundly the first time he’d read it in university. Not that the experiences of Scout — Miss Jean Louise Finch, that is — growing up in the Deep South bore any resemblance to his own upbringing in Chicago.

But the story — of the truths we hide, of the search for justice — was timeless.

In fact, maybe that book had as much to do with him joining the OSI as did the ghosts of the family he had never known. Tom Robinson, a black man, was charged with raping a white girl name of Mayella Ewell. The only physical evidence was Mayella’s badly bruised face: she’d been punched repeatedly by a man who had led with his left. Her father, a nasty impoverished drunk, was left-handed. Tom Robinson was a cripple; his left arm was twelve inches shorter than his right, and ended in a tiny shriveled hand. Tom testified that Mayella had thrown herself at him, that he’d rejected her advances, and that her father had beaten her for tempting a black man. There was not one shred of evidence to support the rape charge, and Tom Robinson was physically incapable of inflicting the beating.

But in that sleepy Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, the all-male, all-white jury had found Tom Robinson guilty as charged. A white girl’s testimony had to be taken over a black man’s and, well, even if Robinson wasn’t guilty of this particular crime, he was a shiftless nigger and doubtless guilty of something else.