Accused Nazi Guard Speaks Out, Denying He Had Role in Atrocities

Correction Appended

For more than a half century, Jakiw Palij has lived a quiet life in New York City, working as a draftsman until he retired.

Now, the Polish-born Mr. Palij, who immigrated as a war refugee in 1949, is being pursued by federal investigators who say he was a Nazi guard who was complicit in some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust.

In July, a federal judge stripped him of his American citizenship, setting up his deportation.

And on Wednesday federal officials announced they would begin proceedings to deport Mr. Palij (pronounced PAH-lee), ''based on his participation in the persecution of Jewish civilians.''

The officials, from the federal Justice Department, say Mr. Palij, 80, worked at the notorious Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during 1943, when some 6,000 Jews were killed and buried in pits. They say he also worked at the nearby Trawinki training camps for secret service troops trained to carry out the extermination of Polish Jews.

''I know what they say, but I was never a collaborator,'' Mr. Palij said Wednesday night when told the news about the decision to deport him. He stared into the rain and told his version of the story.

He and many other young men in his town, Piadyki, were forced by the Nazis to be guards, he said, noting they were kept on a troop base converted from a farm and made to work night tours patrolling roads and bridges.

''They came and took me when I was 18,'' he said. ''We knew they would kill me and my family if I refused. I did it to save their lives, and I never even wore a Nazi uniform. They made us wear gray guards' uniforms and had us guarding bridges and rivers.''

Mr. Palij insists he never set foot in any camp and never took part in any killings or atrocities during the war. And indeed, federal officials do not accuse him of that. Rather, they say that he, by cooperating as a Nazi guard, ''directly contributed to their eventual slaughter'' by either forcing prisoners to work or preventing them from escaping.

Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of a special investigation unit for the Justice Department, called Mr. Palij ''an essential component in the machinery of annihilation'' at the camps.

''He took part in the persecution of Jewish inmates at Treblinka and ensured that they could not escape, and the end result was that as many as 7,000 people were individually massacred,'' Mr. Rosenbaum said.

''He was very loyal and very capable and served until April 1945, the last weeks of the war, while other soldiers were deserting right and left,'' he said.

In 1949, Mr. Palij emigrated here at age 26 as a refugee of World War II. In 1957, he was granted United States citizenship. Mr. Palij, a retired draftsman with no children, lives in a rear rental apartment on 89th Street in Jackson Heights, a quiet Queens street lined with old brick row houses. He lives on Social Security checks. After two strokes, he is in frail health and takes care of Maria, 72, his wife of 43 years, who now has Alzheimer's disease.

In recent months, however, he has gone from being seen by neighbors as a polite old chap who constantly tinkers with his 1980 Oldsmobile, to a man being portrayed as a Nazi death camp guard with blood on his hands. Jewish demonstrators marched outside his home, calling him a butcher. ''There were 200 Jewish kids out there,'' he said. ''I called the precinct, and the cop told me: 'Leave them alone, and they'll leave. Don't say anything, or you might get a rock through your window.' ''

He has begun entering his home by the alley behind it.

''We get phone calls, people yelling, 'You Nazi!' It scares the hell out of my wife,'' he said.

In July, a federal judge stripped Mr. Palij of his citizenship for falsely claiming in his immigration papers in 1949 that he worked on his father's farm in Poland and at a German factory during the period when he was actually serving the Nazis. Mr. Palij insists that he did this to enter the United States ''to save my life.''

''I spent five years in a refugee camp in Germany, and I had nowhere else to go but America,'' he said.

''These Jewish groups want to hunt down all the living Nazis, and I don't blame them,'' he said, ''but they know I never worked in a camp. They have proof of that.''

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which helps bring former Nazi war criminals to justice, dismissed Mr. Palij's denials.

''Every time they find a guard like this, he says he was forced into service,'' he said. ''To work at those camps, you had to be eager to be there. They only took people they knew were loyal and brutal and not sympathetic to pleas of the inmates.

''The most vicious guards at these camps, they all have this line that they were just the short-order cook or something, when they were actually trained to do nefarious and horrible things.''

Justice Department officials say that since 1979, their investigations have resulted in 73 former Nazis' being stripped of United States citizenship, with 59 of them deported.

But Mr. Palij said Wednesday, ''Let them come and get me.''

''I'm not running. What will they do? Shoot me? Put me in the electric chair? Where are they going to deport me to? What country is going to take an 80-year-old man in poor health?''

Correction: November 22, 2003, Saturday An article yesterday about Jakiw Palij, a Queens resident who faces deportation over accusations that he was a guard at Nazi camps in Poland, included a location incorrectly among those at which he was accused of having been a guard at a Nazi training camp and a slave labor camp for Jews and, because of an editing error, misspelled the name of the correct location. Both camps were at Trawniki, not Trawinki. And the accusations did not involve the death camp at Treblinka. A quotation on this point from Eli M. Rosenbaum, a federal investigator, was rendered incorrectly. He gave the location as Trawniki, not Treblinka.