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The granddaughter of Vladas Zajanckauskas yesterday denounced
an immigration judge's decision to deport the 91-year-old
Sutton man, insisting he's been wrongly accused of helping
Nazi soldiers round up thousands of Jews in the Warsaw
Ghetto during World War II and lead them to their deaths.
"My grandfather is a victim of being a survivor of
the Holocaust," said Denise Ronayne, of Sutton, adding
that Zajanckauskas is devastated by the ruling and plans
to appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals. "Adamantly,
to his dying breath, my grandfather states that he was never
sent to Warsaw."
The Justice Department announced Thursday that on Aug. 2
a federal immigration judge in Boston ordered Zajanckauskas
deported to his native Lithuania, ruling that the government
proved he trained at the notorious Trawniki camp in Nazi-occupied
Poland "to assist in all aspects of Operation Reinhard,
the plan to murder all Jews in Poland."
The judge, rejecting Zajanckauskas's contention that he
was involuntarily forced to serve in the German Army and
merely worked in the canteen at the Trawniki camp, found
he served in a Nazi unit that was deployed to Warsaw in April
1943 to conduct house-to-house searches for Jews and round
them up for slaughter.
In January 2005, a federal judge stripped him of his US
citizenship after concluding he lied on immigration documents
when entering the country in 1950 by writing that he had
been working on his parents' farm in Lithuania up until 1944,
and not disclosing he had been in Trawniki or Warsaw. The
government's case against Zajanckauskas hinges on a Nazi
roster, which lists him as one of 351 guards deployed to
the Warsaw ghetto for the liquidation.
"They had no witnesses who ever saw my grandfather
in Warsaw," said Ronayne.
boston.com
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