JERUSALEM -- A Nazi Holocaust survivor today identified a 36-year-old photograph of retired U.S. autoworker John Demjanjuk as 'Ivan the Terrible,' a sadistic guard who slaughtered thousands of Jews in the Treblinka death camp gas chambers.
'I believe this to be a picture of Ivan of Treblinka,' said Yehiel Reichman, 72, a Polish-born Jew who escaped from Treblinka in a 1943 inmate uprising.
Demjanjuk listened calmly in the fourth week of his war crimes trial as Reichman testified that Ivan's round face, protruding ears, short-cropped hair and brawny, muscular arms are 'etched in my memory.'
'He was a big horse,' he said. 'A tall and sturdy person. He was strong -- tall, strong, sturdy and fat.'
Reichman, now an industrialist from Uruguay, also identified the 1951 picture as 'Ivan' in earlier hearings involving Demjanjuk.
The picture was on Demjanjuk's visa application to the United States and was used in U.S. legal proceedings that eventually led to revocation of his citizenship and his extradition to Israel.
Judge Dalia Dorner asked Reichman if he remembers 'Ivan the Terrible' more than others he encountered at Treblinka.
'This devil, I carried him within me,' responded Reichman, who pointed at Demjanjuk on Monday and shouted 'demon' at him.
'I saw him every step I took,' he said. 'I saw him at night. I saw him in the day. I saw his murderous sadism. I saw him everywhere I looked, with his heinous deeds.'
Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian native on trial for his life, denies he was 'Ivan,' a guard who whipped, stabbed and beat Jews and herded them into the gas chambers at the Nazi death camp. An estimated 850,000 people died in Treblinka in central Poland.
The defendant maintains he is a victim of mistaken identity. He claims he was a Soviet soldier during the war and was captured by the Germans and shuffled from one POW camp to another during the time Israel alleges he was Ivan of Treblinka.
Reichman, in his second day of testimony today, said Treblinka's Ukrainian guards often crammed people into the gas chambers and left them there for up to two days, keeping the gas off and allowing them to suffocate in agony.
'When we took the bodies out, they were almost black,' he said. 'They were just a huge mass.'
In the bitterly cold Polish winter, Reichman recalled, the guards 'would take pleasure in choosing a small group of women, girls.'
'These girls would stand naked opposite the (gas) chamber,' he testified. 'They wouldn't let them go in right away. They would stand out there and clutch each other for warmth.'
Monday, the frail, white-haired Reichman pointed his finger across the courtroom at Demjanjuk and declared, 'This demon Ivan with a drill came up to me and my friend Finkelstein and ordered him to take down his trousers.
'Then he took the drill and began drilling a hole into the buttocks of Finkelstein and said, 'If you yell, I will kill you,'' the witness said in a loud, quaking voice.
'There was blood streaming from him,' Reichman testified. 'He was in unutterable pain. But he did not cry out because he was under this order. Ivan said he would kill him.'
Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian native who moved to Cleveland after World War II and became an autoworker, maintains he was arrested in a case of mistaken identity and was never at Treblinka.
'Ivan was the super demon of Treblinka,' Reichman said. 'He is engraved in my memory night and day. He left me no peace.'
The witness recalled a day when 'Ivan' was off duty, going through the camp with a horse and cart, and heard the screams of victims being herded into the gas chambers.
'He abandoned his horse and cart right there and ran to his quarters to get his large iron bar. Then he ran to the gas chambers so he would get there in time to beat the victims. That was what he lived for. That was his pleasure in life.'
Reichman, whose sister died at the camp, was in Treblinka 11 months, working as a barber, shearing the heads of naked women and girls on their way to die, and as a 'dentist' who pulled gold teeth from corpses.
He also worked sorting the clothes of victims, who always were forced to strip naked shortly after arrival.
'In one pile of clothes, I found my sister's frock,' Reichman said. 'I tore off a little piece of it and kept it in my pocket for many months.'
