Associated Press – August 16, 2007
BOSTON – An immigration judge has ordered the deportation of a 91-year-old retired factory worker because he lied about his part in the Nazi destruction of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto in 1943, federal prosecutors said Thursday.
Immigration Judge Wayne R. Iskra ordered Vladas Zajanckauskas sent to his native Lithuania, according to a news release from Alice S. Fisher, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s criminal division.
Zajanckauskas’ lawyer, Thomas Butters, did not immediately return a call Thursday and a personal phone number for Zajanckauskas could not be located.
The deportation order, issued Aug. 2 and delivered to the Department of Justice on Tuesday, ended an appeal, but the department said Zajanckauskas hasn’t yet left the country. The order comes more than two years after a federal judge revoked his U.S. citizenship.
Zajanckauskas, of Sutton, 40 miles east of Boston, denied he was in Warsaw at the time and said his service was limited to working the bar at the Nazi training camp in Trawniki, Poland.
Justice Department prosecutors said he was recruited into a Nazi-trained guard unit called “Trawniki men” and was on a roster of the guard unit’s members who the Nazi SS deployed to help capture Jews in the Warsaw ghetto to be removed to death camps.
The judge noted that Zajanckauskas admitted that Trawniki men guarded Jews and prevented their escape when they were being rounded up in the ghetto. Trawniki men also conducted house-to-house searches for hidden Jews, fought against resistance fighters and took part in the shooting of some captured Jews, the judge said.
The Nazis killed thousands and burned down the ghetto, street by street, after the Jews resisted attempts to deport them to death camps.
Zajanckauskas was a member of the Lithuanian army, then the Soviet army when that country annexed Lithuania in 1940. He became a German prisoner of war a year later before being recruited for German service in 1942.
He received Nazi ideological instructions with other members of the Trawniki unit and got benefits, including home leave, according to the court ruling.
Zajanckauskas emigrated from Austria in 1950 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1956. Zajanckauskas said he never told immigration officials about his Trawniki service because it would jeopardize his chances of getting into the United States.
(This version CORRECTS the man’s age to 91.)
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