Crying on his front porch, an 88-year-old Michigan man targeted for deportation firmly denied shooting anyone when he was a member of a Nazi-controlled police force during World War II.
John Kalymon was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 2007. Now the
U.S. Justice Department wants him kicked out of the country, a process
that could take years.
“I love this country because it’s my country. I’m going to die
here,” Kalymon, a retired auto engineer, told The Associated Press on
Monday. “They want to remove me, an old man. I never was arrested, pay
my taxes. I don’t know anyone as honest as me.”
But U.S. authorities say Kalymon shot Jews while serving in the
Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in what is now the city of
Lviv. It was part of Poland until 1939.
The government recently served Kalymon with a deportation notice.
His first hearing in immigration court in Detroit is scheduled for Oct.
13.
“With the active assistance of collaborators like John Kalymon, the
Nazis annihilated some 100,000 innocent Jewish men, women and children
in Lviv,” said Eli Rosenbaum, who leads the Justice Department’s effort
to find and deport former Nazis and their helpers.
“Participants in such crimes have forfeited any right to enjoy the
precious privilege of U.S. citizenship or to continue residing in the
United States,” he said in a statement.
The government says it has records showing Kalymon personally reported killing a Jew and firing many shots in 1942.
Kalymon was asked during an interview with the AP whether he had shot anyone.
“No,” he replied firmly.
“I’m a sick man,” he said, referring to prostate cancer. “How can you penalize a common man this way?”
The U.S. government became aware of Kalymon after the fall of the
Soviet Union in 1991. World War II-era archives that had been
inaccessible revealed people who may have concealed their Axis
allegiance when they entered the United States decades ago.
In 2007, after a civil trial, a federal judge in Detroit stripped
Kalymon of his citizenship, saying his two years with the Ukrainian
police resulted in the persecution of civilians.
The government produced a handwritten document in which “Iv
Kalymun” reported firing four shots, killing one Jew and injuring
another. Kalymon admits he spelled his last name both ways when he was
a young man but says he did not go by “Kalymun” when he was a Ukrainian
officer.
Kalymon has insisted he was guarding coal from looters while working as a policeman and had no role in persecuting Jews.
“Why is the Department of Justice doing this? I personally think
resources can be expended in much wiser ways,” his lawyer, Elias Xenos,
said.
He said the government is relying on forged handwriting that doesn’t belong to Kalymon.
Kalymon arrived in the United States in 1949, became a naturalized
citizen six years later and went on to work at Chrysler. He has
acknowledged lying about his police job on his application as a
displaced person but only because he feared being sent to the Soviet
Union.
In May, U.S. authorities deported John Demjanjuk from Cleveland,
sending him to Germany to face trial as an accused accessory to the
murder of 27,900 people at the Sobibor death camp.
That same month, the Justice Department disclosed that Poland’s
Commission for Prosecution of Crimes Against the Polish Nation wanted
U.S. prosecutors to interview Kalymon.
It’s not clear where Kalymon would go if he is deported. The government at this stage is not required to disclose a country.
