Paul Shannon straipsnis "Buvę naciai trokšta ramybės"
On a sand spit divided like many other Florida beach towns by a honky-tonk strip and a jumble of aging hotels is a community troubled by allegations.
The U.S. Justice Department says this beach town of 9,000, where elderly couples chat in Lithuanian by small hotel pools and bulletins in churches proclaim upcoming services in a variety of Slavic languages, has had at least four residents who were Nazi collaborators.
"It is like a farce," the Rev. Vytautas Zakaras said. "The only thing (the Justice Department) has accomplished is to pick on the whole community."
As head of the town's Catholic St.Francis Church, Zakaras is considered the leader of the area's 2,000 to 3,000 Lithuanians. He organizes the Slavic-language services, social events and support for one of his regular parishioners, Kazys Palchiauskas, charged by the federal government with being a Nazi collaborator.
"They picked the kindest man. He is so gentle," Zakaras said.
Palchiauskas' treatment of Jews during World War II was less than gentle, Justice Department, investigators say. As mayor of the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, he signed orders that led to the creation of a ghetto for some 20,000 Jews and forced them to wear conspicuous yellow stars, investigators claim in court documents.
The federal government wants to deport Palchiauskas for not telling immigration officials about what they claim he did 40 years ago. The case now is stalled in federal court in Atlanta because judges are swamped with deportation cases involving Cuban Mariel refugees, said Joseph Lynch, a federal prosecutor.
Palchiauskas, 78, hates to talk about those allegations. He prefers the life of a retired office worker, puttering most mornings in the rock garden around his white cinderblock home. His wife, in a housecoat, helps him pick up leaves and blocks the way of the curious.
"Ask anyone who knows him, my husband is a good man," she said. "They will tell you."
In court, Palchiauskas said he is the victim of a KGB smear campaign.
Zakaras said that Palchiauskas told him, "We didn't know at that time why they were rounding up all the Jews. It was never our thought they would exterminate them."
Like Palchiauskas, retiree Mecis Paskevicius has enjoyed the support of St. Petersburg Beach's Lithuanian community.
Paskevicius, a robust 83-year-old who goes by the name Mike Pasker, said he has been hounded by federal investigators and, to avoid them, moved five years ago into a high-security condominium protected by locked doors and 24-hour security patrols.
"Why is somebody always investigating me?" he said.
Federal prosecutors say Pasker, a retired electrician, helped in "murder, beatings and extermination" of Jews when he was in the Lithuanian security police during the war. The security police was SS-controlled, Justice Department historians said.
"It's all lies," Pasker said, eating an oatmeal breakfast and gesturing around his eighth-floor apartment, filled with floral print furniture and glossy green plastic plants.
"I won't ride in the elevator with him," said Arthur A. Alpert, a retired-U.S. Army colonel who lives a few floors up."He has all the advantages of a free system that he fought against," he said. "That hurts me all the more when I see him walking around. It's like a slap in the face."
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MIAMI — They once shared the simplicity and poverty of peasant life in the small Eastern European villages they called home. The atrocities of war tore them apart. Some became the tormentors, some the tormented. Some marched prisoners to the trains whose last stop was the extermination camps of the Nazi Holocaust. Some were the men and women on those trains.
Now, 45 years later, they're sharing the condominiums and beachfronts of Florida's cities — the survivors and their accused oppressors, who have traveled to the same places in the sun for the same reasons on very different roads. This is a story of common roots and conflicting goals, of men and women who survived — in starkly contrasting ways — the horrors of World War II and are now fighting a battle of memories and history in such places as Miami, Hollywood and Delray Beach.
Florida, for years the home of one of the nation's largest concentrations of Holocaust survivors, is now the focus of Justice Department efforts to find and deport Nazi collaborators who slipped into this country after World War II without disclosing their ties to the Nazis. The Justice Department says that effort will intensify in coming months. As it does, it is likely to become more common for men such as Irving Kurek, 62, of Delray Beach, a Jewish survivor of a Latvian concentration camp in the city of Riga, to begin reliving the darkest moments of their lives.
Since Kurek heard news reports about Konrads Kalejs, a Latvian emigre arrested in Miami Beach last April and accused of being a guard at the Riga camp, he has been troubled by a recurring nightmare.
"When I close my eyes, I see the same story unfolding as if it were 1945," Kurek said. "I see four people putting on German uniforms, and they are walking in the street like the Germans from the years before."
Anthony Uhlar of Fort Lauderdale also was disturbed when he heard of Kalejs' arrest — but not for Kurek's reason.
Uhlar, a Ukrainian emigre who lambasts deportation efforts by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, has raised money to defend accused Nazis and is critical of the government's reliance on evidence taken from residents of Soviet bloc nations. He says the evidence is fabricated by the Soviet KGB secret police to smear the credibility of the violently anti - Communist emigre groups, from which nearly all of the accused collaborators hail.
"What a shame!" Uhlar said. "The Russians are using Jewish people against us. OSI is playing right into their hands."
Uhlar said he has raised thousands of dollars to defend Bohdan Koziy, a former Fort Lauderdale hotel owner and fellow Ukrainian, against Justice Department allegations that he participated in wartime atrocities. Koziy is now a fugitive. Uhlar holds his mail. This collision of passions has its root in events decades ago in countries thousands of miles from South Florida.
Both the emigres and the Holocaust survivors came here from the Displaced Persons camps that dotted Europe after World War II. In the confusion that followed the war, camps created for refugees from Communist-controlled Eastern Europe and for surviving Jews also became havens for fleeing Nazi collaborators.
Unlike German Nazis, the collaborators from Eastern European villages were difficult for immigration officials to spot. They told officials they were farmers, like most of the other emigres.
As the survivors and emigres grew older, they left established Jewish and ethnic neighborhoods in Northeastern and Midwestern cities, looking for a warm place to spend their
remaining time among their own kind. Florida.
"The defendants are older people, and older people tend to retire to Florida," said Michael Wolf, deputy director of OSI, which handles cases involving alleged Nazi collaborators.
Justice Department records show Florida has become the center of the government's nationwide search for 10,000 suspected Nazi collaborators and war criminals who slipped into the United States from Eastern Europe. Most of those have since died, but the department is pursuing 300 cases and expects to open hundreds more in the next several years.
Eight of the 45 elderly emigres the government has formally accused of taking part in Adolf Hitler's death machine, which killed 6 million European Jews, have lived in Florida — the highest concentration of any state in the nation, records show.
Almost without exception, the accused have been Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian emigres who flocked to the United States after the war, along with thousands of survivors. The accused collaborators, however, make up just a tiny percentage of the state's burgeoning emigre communities.
Those communities, numbering about 15,000 residents in South Florida, now are rallying support for the accused and working to end the Justice Department's investigations.
X At the doors of a Miami church holding a Lithuanian language service, a man hands out mimeographed postcards addressed to Florida's members of Congress. Stop the Nazi-hunt, the cards say.
X In a Broward County Ukrainian club, a man solicits contributions for the legal defense of accused Nazi collaborators. Evidence against them was trumped up by the KGB, the man says.
X Under the high ceilings of a Hungarian church in Miami, a deputy bishop works on a resolution condemning the use of tax dollars to hunt for alleged collaborators. He wants community leaders to sign the resolution and send it to the White House.
At the same time, survivors in South Florida are banding together for the opposite purpose.
X A Palm Beach County Holocaust survivor mounts a letterwriting and petition drive in support of the Justice Department's investigations.
X The Anti - Defamation League of B'nai B'rith releases a 40-page report in North Miami that says the campaign to eliminate the investigations is marked by anti-Semitic themes. The report strongly recommends that the hunt for collaborators continue.
X Local survivor groups establish a network that gives investigators quick access to survivors who might help identify accused Nazi collaborators.
The political battle over the Justice Department's investigations is being fought out of sight of most people in South Florida. It is carried out in emigre clubs whose members are linked by bonds of common language and cultures and in equally tight-knit survivor groups that don't welcome outsiders.
The soldiers are old men such as John Paul Najy and Sam Desperak, both in their 70s, who were in Europe during the war. For them, the success of the Justice Department investigations will in part determine how people view the war after they're gone. For them, it's a matter of how history, will be written.
"Why should the U.S. spend any money for this Nazi hunt? We condemn this effort," said Najy, deputy bishop of the Hungarian Church of the Reformation in Miami.
As chairman of South Florida's Captive Nations Committee, made up of emigre leaders, Najy asked the group to send a resolution calling for an end to the government's hunt for Nazis sent to the nation's elected officials on July 20. That is the day emigres will parade in Miami as part of national ceremonies honoring their homelands, now behind the Iron Curtain. It also is the day they will demonstrate their numbers and remind politicians of the strength of their well-funded political organizations that have operated in the country since the early 1950s.
Special investigations office Deputy Director Wolf said there is no immediate danger of his office folding, but men such as Desperak, an Auschwitz survivor now retired in Delray Beach who is heading a letter-writing and petition drive in support of the Justice Department, are taking no chances.
"The people who are doing these things (to stop the investigations) are hurting the Holocaust movement," Desperak said. The 1,100-member group he heads, Holocaust Survivors of
South Florida, once concentrated on encouraging survivors to give recorded accounts of their experiences. But the effort to abolish OSI has spurred the group into a lobbying campaign of its own.
"We have to do something about this," Desperak said.
The recent B'nai B'rith report was an attempt to do just that — publicize the survivors' position and brand the emigre campaign as anti-Semitic.
"I think one can safely say this (anti-Justice Department) effort has its resonant voice in certain elements in South Florida's emigre community," said Arthur Teitelbaum, the antidefamation league's southernarea director.
"That is very unfair," said Harald Hinno, a Fort Lauderdale man who is president of the Broward Estonian Club. He has contributed money to a legal fund for the defense of Estonians accused of war crimes, saying the Nazi rule was so brutal that people had to collaborate to some extent just to survive.
"The emigres are not anti-Semitic, Hinno said. "We are against things that are not right for our people."
Emigre groups have established national networks to advance their goals. Locally distributed issues of the Ukrainian Echo newspaper appeal for contributions to a Toronto group called the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, which fights the Nazi-hunting effort.
Earlier this year, hundreds in Dade County's Lithuanian community converged on St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church to hear a mass in Lithuanian celebrating the 500th anniversary of St. Casimir.
After the mass, churchgoers were handed three postcards by a man standing outside. The cards, which were crudely printed and riddled with misspellings, were addressed to Sens. Paula Hawkins, Lawton Chiles and the U.S. Attorney General's Office.
"In the name of justice, I am kindly asking you to use your influence so the cooperation between the Soviet KGB and the Office of Special Investigation be ended," the cards stated.
Periodically, the national steering committees of some clubs send South Florida members position papers calling the hunt a smear campaign against emigres. Others, such as the May paper from the Estonian American National Council, contain long commentaries on the blamelessness of collaborators.
"Estonians were not pro-Nazi, but anti-Soviet," the paper states. "Their fight for national survival against Soviet domination led to some inevitable cooperation with German authorities. There was no third alternative at the time."
Survivor groups have established national networks of their own.
Maurice Fonarez, 76, a Latvian Jew also now retired in Delray Beach, is taking direct action to assist the Justice Department. He has appeared as a witness at recent collaborator trials in Germany and has circulated pictures of accused Nazi collaborator Kalejs to 600 other Latvian survivors across the nation. He said he succeeded in finding a witness to testify against Kalejs at upcoming deportation hearings.
The Justice Department's special investigations office, created in 1979 to hunt down suspected Nazi collaborators who lied on visa applications to enter the country after the war, finds itself caught in the middle.