DETROIT (AP) — An 88-year-old retired auto engineer told a judge through his attorney Tuesday that he never shot Jews while serving in a Nazi-controlled police force in Ukraine during World War II, as the government began laying out its case as to why he should be deported.
John
Kalymon, of suburban Detroit, denied the U.S. Department of Justice’s
assertion that he claimed to have fired his gun at least eight times
and killed a Jew in August 1942, when Jews were being rounded up and
removed from what is now Lviv, Ukraine.
During Tuesday’s initial
hearing, Judge Elizabeth Hacker told the Justice Department to file a
brief detailing its case by early 2010. Xenos would have until Feb. 26
to respond to the brief. A trial date has not been set.
Kalymon
was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 2007, and the government is
seeking to deport him. It hasn’t been determined where he would go.
“My heart is pounding a little bit harder. I’m too old and sick,” Kalymon told The Associated Press after the brief hearing.
There
is no dispute that Kalymon, in his early 20s, served in the
Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in Lviv, which was part of
Poland until the Soviet Union invaded in 1939.
His lawyer, Elias
Xenos, described the police unit as a group with little authority,
comparable to a reserve force guarding streets and rooms in police
stations.
But the government says Kalymon should be deported
because his service resulted in the persecution of civilians. He also
failed to disclose the police job when he applied to enter the United
States in 1949.
The Justice Department became aware of Kalymon
after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 when World War II-era
archives became accessible. Xenos insists the government is relying on
forged handwriting that doesn’t belong to his client.
In 2007, however, a federal judge stripped him of his citizenship, a decision that was upheld by an appeals court.
“It’s
turned our life upside down,” Kalymon’s son, Alex Kalymon, said of the
case. “I’m very disturbed. My father’s not done anything wrong.”
