Dutch Jews told the German trial of alleged Nazi guard John Demjanjuk, 89, on Monday how their relatives were rounded up by the Nazis during the Second World War and taken away to be killed, DPA reported.
Demjanjuk appeared in court sitting in a wheelchair and kept his eyes shut during most of the hearing, as he did on the first two days of the trial three weeks ago. The trial was resuming after a long adjournment was ordered for him to recover from a slight infection.
The survivors have joined their names as private prosecutors to the Munich indictment, which accuses Demjanjuk of being one of the guards who herded 27,900 Jews into gas chambers at Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland.
"Sobibor is a painful wound that can never heal for me," said an 86-year-old retired Amsterdam pharmacist.
His eyes filling with tears, he said his parents, his sister and his girlfriend were all killed. He had managed to escape the Nazis by making his way to Britain via Belgium, France, Spain and Canada, but felt guilty that he had left behind those he loved.
"Those events have dominated every day of my life since," he said, describing how he did not learn of his relatives' fate at Sobibor till a few months after the Second World War ended in 1945.
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk is alleged to have worked at the camp for several months in 1943 after the Nazis offered to free him from a camp for Soviet prisoners of war if he would work as a uniformed guard for the SS, the Nazi Party's own army.
He was expelled in May from his US home to Germany to face the Holocaust charges.
A 70-year-old man told the court, "I am prosecuting on behalf of my parents." He said he had been a little boy when his parents were taken away from him to be killed at Sobibor in 1943.
"My mother was in advanced pregnancy at the time," he said. "So I am also prosecuting on behalf of my unborn brother or sister." He said another family took him in so that he survived the Holocaust.
Another Dutch co-prosecutor, 67, said he had been just a baby, 1, when his father was taken away to Sobibor and had not known till he was 6 or 7 that his father had been murdered.
"I asked my mother why I didn't have any father to play football with like other boys did," he said. That was when he was told the terrible truth. He later learned that 74 of his relatives had been murdered by the Nazis in various German concentration camps.
Demjanjuk is accused of being an accessory to murder and could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison if convicted.