By 2003, I had spent more than five years researching an event lasting only 124 seconds: the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling heavyweight championship fight of June 22, 1938. Because the key actors in that drama—an African-American hero on the one hand and Adolf Hitler’s favorite boxer on the other—were dead, along with all of the ancillary characters and nearly all of the 70,000 fans on hand at Yankee Stadium that night, newspaper reports were key. And I read them copiously: white papers and black papers, American papers and German papers and French papers and South African papers, papers on the left (the Daily Worker had a sports section, thanks largely to interest in Louis) and on the right.

One paper I’d neglected, quite understandably, was Nasz Przeglad. It was the Polish-language paper in Warsaw favored by many of that city’s more assimilated Jews, but I wasn’t sure it was available in the United States, and besides, it was long-since defunct; this is what happens to a publication when most of its readers are murdered. But shortly before the book went to bed, I decided to take a look, via an English-speaking friend in Poland. One of my theses was that no one was more interested in the fight than the Jews: By taking on Schmeling, who had defended Hitler’s regime from the outset, Louis was just about the only man around who was standing up to Hitler. Certainly no European leaders were. Surely, I surmised, the fight would have been followed closely in Poland, which had the largest—and, outside of Germany itself, the most menaced—Jewish community in Europe. Throughout Central Europe that night, one needed only to have stayed up late (the fight’s opening bell rang at 4:00 a.m. Warsaw time), tuned in to the Deutscher Rundfunk, and understood German to follow what was going on at Yankee Stadium. The Nazis had their own announcer—Arno Hellmis, who doubled as a reporter for the party’s leading newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter—at ringside, doing the play-by-play.

Given the late hour, Louis’ electrifying first-round knockout of Schmeling came too late for the European papers of June 23. But sure enough, on June 24, Nasz Przeglad (it’s Polish for “Our Review”) devoted much of its front page to the fight, including a witty description of the inconsolable Hellmis’ fractured, indecipherable account, one that had left much of Germany bewildered about what had actually occurred. (Contrary to the mythology, the broadcast was not interrupted in mid-fight.) But most striking of all to me was a poem, set off in a large box on an inside page. It was titled “K.O.” and was dedicated to “the black man Louis who had defeated the German theory of racial superiority.” The author was named Władysław Szlengel, and its concluding, and by far most dramatic, stanza went as follows:

Hey, Louis! You probably don’t know
What your punches mean to us
You, in your anger, punched the Brown Shirts
Straight in their hearts—K.O.

It isn’t only novelists who fall in love with their characters. The same is true for writers of nonfiction, particularly if those characters have been misunderstood or forgotten—perhaps, subliminally, we hope that someday someone may do the same for us. One feels these things even more acutely with anyone who died prematurely or brutally or anonymously, robbed even of a fair chance at immortality. Who was Władysław Szlengel? When I first encountered him, I assumed he was just one more of the 6 million. Had anyone remembered him or his work, his name would certainly pop up in the card catalog of the New York Public Library, but it never had. Nor had he been mentioned in the pages of the New York Times. So, I resolved to bring him back to life. Even putting someone’s name in print can be a rescue operation; mentioning Szlengel in my book, and including a small portion of his poem, was the best and only homage I could pay. Mine turned out to be an imperfect tribute: I misspelled his name. Not surprisingly, no one corrected me. Virtually everyone who could have, died at the same time he did.

But much to my surprise, a friend who read my book—a student of Jewish Warsaw in the 1920s and 1930s—had heard of Szlengel. Belatedly, I did a Google search on him, and two things instantly became clear. First, he was not just another of Hitler’s faceless victims: His image, in a photograph he’d inscribed in September 1939, just a few days after Germany invaded Poland, suddenly appeared before me, a bookish and stern young man in a suit and tie, peering warily at the photographer from behind dark, round eyeglasses. And second, his poem on the fight was not some aberration but part of a much larger body of work, one that grew in sophistication and significance as his circumstances changed. Within three years, it turned out, Szlengel was to become one of the principal poetic voices of the Warsaw Ghetto.

“I don’t want to leave behind only statistics,” he explained in 1943, as the Nazis cleaned out the last remnants of Warsaw’s Jewish quarter. And he didn’t. His poems are among the most remarkable written testaments of the Holocaust, and yet, for a whole host of reasons, rooted in his chosen language and the sheer enormity of what happened and the nature of historic memory, almost no one knows them, or him. Szlengel would be famous if only he were not so completely forgotten.

Continue reading: Warsaw’s Jews, machers, and “The Frightened Generation.” Or view as a single page.

And yet, Demjanjuk is not in jail—he was freed pending appeal, a process expected to take something like a year. How you feel about this probably depends on how felt about trying a wheelchair-bound 91-year-old in the first place. In Tablet Magazine in November 2009, Michael C. Moynihan argued this was the right thing to do; around the same time, in Esquire Scott Raab was not so sure; already, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has argued that failure to imprison him “is an insult to his victims and to the survivors, that after all of this they may see John Demjanjuk strolling in the park in Germany for having been complicit in the mass murder over 28,000;” at the very least, the Center’s Rabbi Martin Hier added, he could have been placed under house arrest. On the one hand, Demjanjuk is no longer even about “never forgetting;” it is about punishing an individual offender, who in fact served roughly five years on Israeli death row before he was freed. On the other hand, the thousands and thousands of Demjanjuk’s victims surely would have preferred to have made it to 91.

Demjanjuk Convicted for Role in Nazi Death Camp [NYT]
Related: Still Terrible [Tablet Magazine]
The Eichmann Trial [Nextbook Press]
John Demjanjuk: The Last Nazi [Esquire]

Avner Yonai did. And it came, fittingly enough, while he was watching the film Everything Is Illuminated, based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. Which led, of course, to the mandolins.

But first, the epiphany.

Yonai, who runs a moving and storage company in California, was born in Israel. His father’s family emigrated from Poland to Palestine in 1932; his mother’s family, or at least some of them, did the same in 1935. Those that didn’t perished in Treblinka, along with the other Jewish residents of Gora Kalwaria, or as it’s known in Yiddish, Ger.

No one in Yonai’s family talked much about life in Ger. “Living in Israel, they had no desire to return to Poland, or to talk about it,” he said. And Yonai didn’t think much about it until he found himself in a darkened theater, watching Elijah Wood return to his character’s ancestral shtetl and stand before a monument commemorating the date of the massacre in which most of his forebears lost their lives: March 18, 1942.

“I was born on March 18,” Yonai said. “I don’t believe in signs, but that was too much of a coincidence.”

Within two weeks, Yonai was in Ger, trying to find traces of his own family. He met with a survivor, one Avrum Henryk Prajs, now 94, who pulled out the town’s Yizkor book and proceeded to show Yonai a photograph of his grandfather, two great uncles, and a cousin, taken sometime in the early 1930s.

It was a photo of an orchestra. The Mandolin Orchestra of Ger.

One can still find mandolin orchestras in most large cities in this country. In the early decades of the 20th century, when the Gibson guitar company actively promoted them, mandolin orchestras were everywhere—especially among the immigrant communities for whom the mandolin carried memories of home.

The mandolin originated in Italy in the 15th century, and there exists a large body of Baroque and classical music for the instrument. Cheap and portable, it rapidly became a staple of folk music across the continent, especially in the eastern parts; there is Slovakian mandolin music, Ukrainian mandolin music, and a significant amount of Jewish mandolin music. “The mandolin was the instrument you would sit around and play with your friends,” said mandolinist and guitarist Jeff Warschauer.

Sometime in the 19th century, some enterprising soul realized that mandolins could be built in different sizes and grouped just like bowed string instruments: mandolinas for violas, mandocellos for cellos, mandobasses for contrabasses. Thus was born the mandolin orchestra, Jewish versions of which quickly sprang up across Europe and North America, their mostly amateur members furiously picking away in a mass of quivering, shimmering tremolos. My old mandolin teacher, Mr. Katz, led just such a group in Montreal when he wasn’t schooling little kids in Eastern European chestnuts like “Tumbalalaika” and “Dark Eyes” (“Ochi Chornye”)—the latter having been a favorite of my maternal grandfather, who emigrated to Canada in the early 1920s from Krynki (Krinek), just 150 miles northeast of Ger.

That black-and-white portrait of the Mandolin Orchestra of Ger eventually led Avner Yonai to some long-lost relatives in Israel. But that was hardly the end of it. Given that most of his mother’s family had played in the orchestra, Yonai decided to resurrect it.

Figuring out what the orchestra played has not been simple. Prajs can identify its members, but he was just a child when they gathered at the Y.L. Peretz Library in Ger during the 1920s and 1930s. In a YouTube video you can see him struggling to recall what they might have performed.

One can hazard a guess as to the general outlines of the group’s repertoire based on the kinds of music that were popular among Eastern European Jews at the time, and on what Jewish mandolin orchestras in America played during the same period. “I would expect that they would be playing light classical pieces, tangos, Yiddish theater songs, and folk favorites,” says Warschauer, who has examined the repertoire of the old Workmen’s Circle Mandolin Orchestra in New York, among others. But it’s still a guess. As Yonai says, “There is not an archive where we can go and ask the librarian, ‘Give me the repertoire for the mandolin orchestra of Gora Kalwaria.’ ”

But Yonai is not one to give up easily. He has used the genealogy website JewishGen and the YIVO archives to find contacts and archival materials among the scattered descendants of the Jews of Ger. He has hired a doctoral candidate in ethnological studies at the University of Warsaw to pore over old newspapers, sheet music, record catalogs—anything that might hint at the mandolin orchestra’s repertoire. Together with the Israeli mandolinist Benny Bilsky, who has volunteered to act as music director for the project, he has even visited the large community of Gerrer Hasidim in Bnei Brak, Israel, searching for tunes that might have found their way into the orchestra’s book.

(It’s a safe bet that the orchestra dealt mainly in secular material, but you never know. As Warschauer points out, the old Jewish mandolin orchestras here in North America played “some Yiddish things, some things we might call klezmer, and even some Hasidic things.”)

A resurrected version of the Mandolin Orchestra of Ger is scheduled to perform at the 26th annual Jewish Music Festival in the Bay Area this coming March. The program has not yet been finalized, nor, for that matter, has the personnel list, though the festival’s director, Eleanor Shapiro, hopes to attract a roster of international mandolin virtuosi.

So, if you have a chest of old mandolin music from your great-grandfather’s collection moldering in the attic, or a Yizkor book that happens to mention the pieces that your great-uncle’s mandolin orchestra played in Poland in 1933, drop Yonai a line. He’ll be happy to hear from you.

For Avner Yonai, this is not just about mandolins. It is about connecting to a past that otherwise exists only in fading memories and rare photographs. And it is, first and foremost, about a small group of people who stayed behind when others, more prescient or maybe just luckier, chose to leave. People he met on his first trip to Ger, gazing at him in black-and-white across the span of nearly one hundred years.

“For me,” he said, “it is a family thing.”

Pangs of sympathy for an enfeebled octogenarian, wheelchair-bound and encircled by weeping family members, are understandable. But for those familiar with the story of Demjanjuk, it should be a fleeting emotion. Born in the Ukraine and a former member of the Trawniki SS, Demjanjuk stands accused of complicity in the murder of 29,000 Jews at the Nazi death camp in Sobibor, Poland. Last week, a team of German doctors determined that, despite his advanced age, Demjanjuk was fit to stand trial for war crimes, and yesterday he was formally charged.

Demjanjuk, convicted in an Israeli court of being the notoriously sadistic Treblinka guard “Ivan the Terrible,” saw that conviction overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993. So why try him again, in a different country? The evidence collected two decades ago strongly suggests that prosecutors in that case had a Nazi guard, just not the one they thought they did.

During investigations leading up to his first trial, American investigators obtained—and withheld—an identity card placing Demjanjuk at an SS training facility in Trawniki, Poland, at the death camp at Sobibor, where approximately 250,000 Jews were killed, and at a concentration camp in Flossenburg, Germany. His defenders have long claimed that the document, delivered to prosecutors by the Soviet Union, was a KGB forgery. But that argument has become impossible to sustain: prosecutors later uncovered corroborating documents in the German Federal Archives in Koblenz confirming both Demjanjuk’s military ID number and the timeline of his service in occupied Poland.

When entering the United States in 1952, Demjanjuk listed Sobibor as his primary residence between the years of 1937 to 1943. When questioned on this, Demjanjuk, who admitted that his timeline was a fabrication, claimed to have spotted the name on a nearby map when filling in immigration paperwork, though he later changed his testimony, claiming that a fellow refugee provided him with the town name. But as historian Gitta Sereny notes in her book The German Trauma, Sobibor was “little more than a railway halt in the forest [that] hardly appeared on pre-war Polish maps.” So, asked investigators, if Sobibor was nothing more than a unknown railroad junction—a fact the defense never convincingly challenged—how did Demjanjuk come to choose it as his alleged pre-war home?

To those investigating the “Ivan the Terrible” charges, these contradictions and shifting histories suggested that Demjanjuk was likely hiding a more sinister history. Indeed, an American judge called his oscillating alibis “so incredible as to legitimately raise the suspicions of his prosecutors that he lied about everything.”

While receiving significant coverage in the German media, Demjanjuk’s recent deportation hasn’t been widely debated in this country. But when the news reached conservative columnist Pat Buchanan, he compared Demjanjuk, who admitted having had an SS tattoo under his arm removed after the war, to both Alfred Dreyfus and Jesus Christ. Buchanan deploys an argument—and Google reveals its popularity elsewhere—that is at once reductionist and compelling: what good comes from prosecuting a feeble old man previously exonerated of being a guard at Treblinka? Contained within this question is an odd neutrality on the matter of Demjanjuk’s having served at a different death camp—and the implication that there’s a statute of limitations on genocide. Nor is it particularly relevant that, as is often argued, that at such an advanced age Demjanjuk is no “threat,” and thus unlikely to foment a pogrom in suburban Cleveland. The prosecutors aren’t likely motivated by a desire to reform, but to punish. Those who insist upon bringing Demjanjuk before a court, Buchanan argues, are motivated by the “same satanic brew of hate and revenge that drove another innocent Man up Calvary that first Good Friday 2,000 years ago.” (It is perhaps the one instance in which Richard Nixon is a useful character witness. In 1992, Nixon told his then-assistant Monica Crowley that Buchanan was “so extreme” that he’s “over there with the nuts.”)

Surprisingly, though, after his acquittal on charges that he served as a guard at Treblinka—significant and compelling evidence suggested that, while a member of the SS, prosecutors placed him at the wrong camp—the Israeli government expressed little interested in prosecuting Demjanjuk for his role as guard at Sobibor, arguing that too much time had passed to make a convincing case. According to Sereny, Israel only agreed to the first trial after three conditions were met: “the accused had to be healthy and reasonably young, indictable for murder, and credible witnesses had to be available.”

In Germany, newspapers across the political spectrum are broadly supportive of the new prosecution. As the left-leaning Süddeutsche Zeitung recently editorialized, “the German judicial system has been so terribly slow and forgiving” of fascist—and, it should be added, communist—war criminals and that this will likely be “the last Nazi trial.” And as such, let’s make this one count.

Does this suggest that the prosecution of a cog, a bit player like Demjanjuk, serves only to satiate a German quest for historical absolution? Buchanan argues that “[h]e is to serve as the sacrificial lamb whose blood washes away the stain of Germany’s sins.” This is undeniably a factor, though Buchanan also claims that it’s impossible for Germany to prosecute a homegrown war criminal, “[b]ecause the Germans voted an amnesty for themselves in 1969.” This would come as welcome news to the family of 90-year-old former Wehrmacht officer Josef Scheungraber, a German national currently on trial in Munich for the 1944 “reprisal” murder of 14 Italian civilians. (Buchanan, it seems, is referring to a 1968 modification of Article 50 of the German penal code requiring prosecutors prove that that defendants acted out of “base motivation”—i.e. anti-Semitism—in the commission of war crimes.)

If convicted—and simply establishing Demjanjuk’s voluntary employment in a Nazi death camp is significant—divining the motives of those who agitated for his deportation and prosecution will be interesting only to historians, who will weigh the role of “German guilt” in this final flesh-and-blood confrontation with its hideous past, and the conspiracy cranks, who will track the hidden hand of “international Jewry.”

For the victims like Thomas Blatt, a former inmate at Sobibor, such debates are inconsequential: “I don’t care if he goes to prison or not—the trial is what matters to me. I want the truth. The world should find out how it was at Sobibor.”

Michael C. Moynihan is a senior editor at Reason magazine.