Nice Old Guys

Jews captured during the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Poland, April 19-May 16, 1943.

— National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.

Nice Old Guys

The neighbours are amazed, they're shocked, disbelieving, speechless with horror. They would far prefer to defy the possibility that the neighbour they have so long been familiar with -- the nice guy who lives two houses down on a street where houses seldom change hands, and people are comfortable in their neighbourhoods -- could possibly have been involved in war crimes. It is simply not credible. They know him, he has been a good neighbour.

Old Mikey? Impossible. He's highly respected. He has lived with his wife in that same house they own since forever. He's 94 years of age, after all. Someone with sinister motivations is besmirching the name and reputation of an honourable old man for their own nefarious purposes. Could be he has enemies, although for heaven's sake, he's 94 years old, give the guy a break. But there are the television news trucks parked outside his house in Minneapolis.

"I know him personally. We talk, laugh. He takes care of his yard and walks with his wife", says next-door neighbour Gordon Gnasdoskey. Like Michael Karkov, Mr. Gnasdoskey is of Ukrainian origin; his grandfather had emigrated from Ukraine to the United States, too. And he finds these revelations dreadfully disturbing; how can it conceivably be possible that the nice old guy he feels so comfortable with, committed wartime atrocities?

But yes, Michael Karkoc has been identified as a former commander of a Nazi SS-led military unit. Despite which, he has lived in peace and security for the past sixty years in the land of the free and the brave. The unit which he commanded was associated with the 1944 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Where Nazis with whom this man served brutally suppressed the last-stand Jewish rebellion against their ghetto community's certain death through the Nazi war machine.

How did he manage to enter the United States? Simple enough, looking for a better life, like so many others like himself, he lied to American immigration officials. What's a lie committed to attain a goal, when you've already committed the most monstrous human-rights abuses that human beings are capable of doing, when they believe they are part of a human movement that sanctions genocide? He informed U.S. authorities in 1949 that he had never been involved in military service.

And ten years later he became a naturalized American citizen. Goal accomplished. The man who had served Fascist Germany as a top commander in the Ukrainian Self Defence Legion, a unit held responsible for wartime atrocities including burning villages with women and children held within the inferno to die, wanted and achieved for himself a lifetime of freedom and security in a new life within the United States.