Demjanjuk cabaret causes a stir

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John Demjanjuk is currently standing trial in Germany in two places at once.

In Munich, the 90-year-old Ukrainian and alleged concentration camp guard is facing 27,900 counts of accessory to murder in what is being called "the last great Nazi trial."

Meanwhile, in Heidelberg, Demjanjuk - played by German actor Klaus Cofalka-Adami - finds himself reliving his earlier trial in Israel on similar charges in Jewish-Canadian playwright Jonathan Garfinkel's The Trials of John Demjanjuk: A Holocaust Cabaret.

With its human portrayal of Demjanjuk and irreverent format, Garfinkel's 2004 play is causing a stir in Europe: It has been covered extensively in the German media and even Russian and Ukrainian television stations have come to report on it.

"The press has been pretty intense," Garfinkel says on the phone from Germany. "It is kind of amazing as a writer to have what you've written about suddenly become a current event."

First staged in Toronto in 2004, The Trials of John Demjanjuk originally focused on Demjanjuk's first trial in Israel in the 1980s. Deported from Cleveland, Demjanjuk, a retired auto worker, stood accused of crimes against humanity at the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps. The prosecution alleged that he was "Ivan the Terrible," a notorious guard who tortured Jewish prisoners on their way to the gas chambers.

Demjanjuk was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death, but the Israeli Supreme Court overturned that verdict in 1993 after doubts arose that he was in fact "Ivan the Terrible."

But after returning to the United States, Demjanjuk was still pursued. In 2009, after years of investigation and legal processes, he was deported again - this time to Germany to stand trial for his role at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

As for Garfinkel's play, the first pecks of interest from Germany came in 2003 when a reading was held at the National Arts Centre. But the German agent who contacted Garfinkel at the time to get a copy of the play didn't think he could get a production mounted. "He said, 'I like the play, but Germany isn't ready for this,' " Garfinkel recalls.

By the time Demjanjuk was extradited to Germany last year, however, some Germans were.

Catja Baumann, who is directing The Trials of John Demjanjuk at the Heidelberg Theatre, was attracted to the play precisely because it confronted audiences with the issues surrounding the Holocaust in an original fashion. Movies like Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds have opened the door to new ways of dealing with the subject, says Baumman, who, at 29, is of a generation ever further removed from the atrocities of the Second World War.

"In Germany, people are very careful with this topic - it's not normal to approach the topic of the Holocaust with humour, with dancing and singing," Baumann says on the phone from her base in Stuttgart. "I don't think a German would have written this play like [Garfinkel]did."

As a condition of the Heidelberg Theatre production, Garfinkel agreed to attend the new trial in Munich with Baumann and update his play. There, in November, he came face to face with the subject of his play for the first time.

Garfinkel describes the scene in the courtroom in the early days of the trial, which is still ongoing, as "surreal": the then 89-year-old defendant was either in a wheelchair or hospital bed, often moaning. A pretty Ukrainian court translator whispered in his ear, while Holocausts survivors testified against him.

"As a person, he was inconsequential," Garfinkel recalls. "He's not talking at all and nobody was addressing him. In some ways, it was anticlimactic."

(Last week, Demjanjuk finally made his first public utterance of the trial. "It's an injustice that Germany tries to make me, a prisoner of war, into a war criminal to try to deviate from its own war crimes," he said in a statement read by his lawyer, Ulrich Busch. "This trial is torture for me.")

Garfinkel left feeling that the trial of Demjanjuk - a Soviet soldier who was captured by the Nazis in 1942 and then trained as a Nazi guard, according to the current indictment - was "too little too late."

"I don't think anybody is too old to be prosecuted for war crimes, but I do feel that the symbol of Demjanjuk has taken over the man Demjanjuk," he says. "He was a low-rung Nazi, not the sadistic controller of the gas chambers, but the stigma of Ivan the Terrible hasn't left him."

After discussing how to update the play with Baumann over Skype for a couple of months, Garfinkel decided to frame the original play with scenes from the Munich courtroom. In the new version, the play is enacted by a group of German cabaret performers and the focus has shifted to being about the "German sense of guilt about its past," he says.

Since opening earlier this month, the critical and audience reaction in Heidelberg - where the play runs in repertory until next month and may return in the fall - has been positive over all. "The success of the opening night is that people laughed and then, the next moment, they were frightened that they had laughed," says Baumann, who has only had one audience member complain to her about the tone. "Everyone who came out and talked to me was very emotional, very moved by what they saw."

Garfinkel was approached on opening night by an old German woman whose father had been in the Gestapo. "She said he would never talk to her about the war, but this play was helpful - in her mind - for Germans to talk about their past," he recalls. "It was quite thrilling to be part of something where the audience felt it was so important to them."