Debbie Cenziper - 12 Nov

At a crowded holiday party in 2016, I met a lawyer from the US Department of Justice. Over a long conversation, Robin Gold described the history and mission of a unit deep inside the massive federal agency that had raced against time to track, identify, and bring to justice Nazi perpetrators found in Americas cities and suburbs in the years after World War II. For three decades, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) pursued a series of high-profile cases against concentration camp guards, police leaders, Nazi collaborators, and propagandists. I found one lesser-known investigation particularly compelling: the search for the men of Trawniki.

Citizen 865 is a story about darkness but also about light, the pursuit of truth by a team of American Nazi hunters that worked to expose the men behind the most lethal operation in the Holocaust. Year after year, the team scrambled to hold these collaborators accountable for their crimes, not only for those who had perished in the war but also for those who had survived, and for the benefit of a world that too often finds itself in the exact same place more than seventy years later, forced to explain bigotry, hate, and mass murder.

This book is a work of nonfiction based on hundreds of hours of interviews with historians and federal prosecutors and thousands of pages of government documents, Nazi rosters and records, scholarly research, trial transcripts, and court filings. Most of the documents came from the US Department of Justice and the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which provided access to several dozen boxes of papers, articles, and records donated in 2015 by former OSI historian Peter Black.

Additional research was conducted in the archives and museums of Prague, Warsaw, and Lublin, Poland. Court transcripts, records, and interviews with those who had direct knowledge of conversations allowed me to reconstruct the dialogue in this book.

At the request of family members, the Polish names of survivors Feliks Wojcik and Lucyna Stryjewska have been used. Taped interviews spanning a decade and on-the-ground research in Lublin, Warsaw, and Vienna allowed me to chronicle their wartime journeys.

I also traveled to Trawniki, Poland, where Nazi leaders in the early years of the war recruited a loyal army of foot soldiers. Some of these men would eventually make their way to the United States and live undetected for years, ordinary Americans with extraordinary secrets.

Their lies unraveled under the unflinching glare of history and through the work of men and women who refused to look away.

It speaks well of American justice that it will not close the books on bestiality until the last participant has felt a frisson of fear and is routed from the land of the free.

George F. Will, the Washington Post, 1998