Were we not speaking of the Holocaust — Shoah, the Greatest Crime Ever Perpetrated, a Darkness Inexplicable, Pure Evil Incarnate — it would be funny.
Because it is the Holocaust, however, it is hilarious: No greater monster left alive, John Demjanjuk sits where Hitler once sat — in a cell in Munich's Stadelheim prison — waiting for his lunch, and for justice to be done to him again.
Again. As the dwindling few real-life Nazis march day by day to hell, as their numbers shrink and our remembrance fades, the faceless face on atrocity's Most Wanted poster is again — again — this recycled Ukrainian peasant, now eighty-nine years old.
Lunch eventually will come. As for justice, who knows when or what that will be. Justice took its time last time, seven years in all, dawdling till the gallows were built; Demjanjuk heard the work crew daily, hammering the planks. But there, at least — in, of all places, Israel — his jailers brought fresh vegetables, and tins of mystery meat, and let him thrust his thick arms through the bars of his cell and fix himself supper on a hot plate.
From those Jews — after he was found guilty of being one of two men who ran the gas chambers at Treblinka, where nearly a million Jews were killed — from them, he got a civilized evening meal.
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