Dead Man's Honda

In the shadowy early morning I sat down in a vacant coffee shop and began working on a new project. I waited for a woman I'd never met. An hour and a half later, I would have just experienced drive-by crazy.

Drive-by crazy is when someone has such blatant pathologies that it gives you whiplash.

When she started talking about the competitiveness of law school admissions, I nodded and mentioned that my ex-boyfriend(a genius with a perfect LSAT score, who graduated top of his class from an ivy league) did not get in to Yale or Stanford Law (he chose Harvard), her eyes popped out of her head.

"Is he white?"

Uh...come again?

"Being a white male in America today is the hardest, hardest, most difficult, demographic to be in that there is..." she said, tisking with her tongue and teeth while she shook her blonde head.

Coffee went up my noise.

"Well, um...yes, he is white. And Jewish, which makes it harder, I think." I meant that a lot of Jewish males apply to law school.

"Oh Jewish? Well that's different....I mean....white males have it really hard."

Ohmygawd, are you a representative of Desperate Housewives of the Klu Klux Klan?

I was just about to pull out my best Central Valley vernacular and ask her if she was shitting me, but I couldn't even get that out before she prattled off a litany of secrets she would like me to keep.

"Are you confidential?" Without waiting for my answer she went on:

"Now my daughter has this issue...but when you work with her, don't let her know, that you know, that she had this issue. Now you need to get her to ask me, to do things for her but she won't ask me unless you can get her to think that it's her idea...."

I wanted to ask her if she was raised by an alcoholic.

"And don't let my kids know that you might be staying with us in June....and don't let my husband know that you might be doing that as well because I just want him to think that I'm still just looking..."

Continuing on after we left the coffee shop she noticed a ticket on her car window.

"Ohhhhh shi--," she said striking her fist into the palm of her opposite hand. "I'm going to have to go get a money order to pay for this because you know, there are a few times when I don't want to be married and this is one of them. I've got to go get the money order and pay for it so that my husband doesn't find out!!"

Did I just get dropped off in an FLDS enclave of Utah without my knowing it? What kind of parallel universe does this woman live in where everything must be kept secret, (even useless information)and where white males are in the "worst" demographic there is and where being Jewish and being white were different things?!

...you're a very bad person Mr. Demjanjuk.

Or Ivan the Terrible.

Or that guy. From that camp.

50 some years ago.

We think.

Again.

I just read this article about a man accused by the German government, of being a former Nazi guard at the Sobibar death camp. This isn't the first time Mr. Demjanjuk has been accused of being a Nazi death camp monster, however:

A native of Ukraine, Demjanjuk emigrated to the U.S. in 1952 and gained citizenship in 1958.

In denying involvement in war crimes, he has said he served in the Soviet army and became a prisoner of war when he was captured by Germany in 1942.

Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986, when the U.S. Justice Department believed he was the sadistic Nazi guard known as Ivan the Terrible from the Treblinka death camp.

He spent seven years in custody before the Israeli high court freed him after receiving evidence that another Ukrainian was that Nazi guard.

The guy is 88 years old. He already spent seven years in custody for a crime he did not commit. Does Munich really think that they can obtain accurate justice for this man now? After all this time? When most of the witnesses are dead? After the prosecution has decided to give him an excessive sentence (responsible for 29,000 deaths), and any record of his being in the Soviet forces is probably very unlikely?

I am not against holding genocidaires accountable for their actions. I applaud the efforts of the current tribunal in Cambodia. I do not, however, think that it is possible to do justice in this instance. If the United States has any gumption at all, it will stand by its citizen if only for the fact that if this man is guilty of the 29,000 precious lives lost in Sobibar , so too is the very country accusing him. And no one is putting the populace of Germany on trial for standing by while their fellow citizens were snatched by the State to a brutal, vile, end.

I am more passionate about this because I lived with a former Luftwaffe pilot. There are competing stories about where his father, a commander in the SS ground units, was exactly during and after the war. The man I took care of swore his father was in custody of the Russians from whom he eventually escaped. I, however, have found evidence suggesting otherwise.

The problem is though, the evidence I found says that his father was tried at a tribunal set up by the U.S. and sentenced to death.

I read the court transcripts-- the proceedings are ridiculous as most military tribunals are.

The curious thing, though, is that when I finally found the picture of the defendant with the same name as my friend's father.....

It wasn't him.

Same name. Same rank. Same country. Same time period.

Wrong face.

Did the US have the wrong guy? Do I have the wrong story? Or is my friend's story about his father escaping the Russian forces, stealing a plane and hitchhiking back to Germany the real story?

After so many years and with so little evidence, I may never know what really happened or who it was the United States tried in that case at Dachau in 1947.

I wish justice for those 29,000 people could be found. I just don't think it's really possible to do justice after all of these years by dragging an old man from his own country in the hopes that this time they have the right guy.