The Justice Department on Monday filed a lawsuit to strip a retired North Side carpenter of his citizenship, saying he hid the details of his service six decades ago in a Nazi-controlled police force.
Federal prosecutors allege that in 1941 Osyp Firishchak joined the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police after it was formed by the Nazi SS.
As a member of the 1st Commissariat in what is now the Ukrainian city of L’viv, he was part of a unit that corralled Jews into the town’s ghetto, arrested those who didn’t wear Star of David armbands and later drove them to concentration camps, the suit alleges.
If prosecutors are successful in U.S. District Court, where the suit was filed Monday, Firishchak could be deported.
At the door of his bungalow Monday morning, Firishchak, 84, was defiant.
“Don’t you think there are more problems around the world than me right now?” he asked. “I don’t have anything to hide. I will tell my side in court.”
David Salk, a neighbor in the 2500 block of West Cullom Avenue, said Firishchak and his wife spend most of their time gardening and taking care of their house, which Monday was decorated with plastic Christmas wreaths. Salk shook his head as he learned of the federal government’s lawsuit.
“I’ve never seen any evidence of anti-Semitism from them–and we’re Jewish,” Salk said. We trade holiday gifts with them every year. We bake [Jewish] Mandel bread for them.”
Henry Weitemeyer, another neighbor, said Firishchak was a longtime carpenter.
“They are good neighbors and wonderful people,” Weitemeyer said. “There’s a witch hunt into everything, it seems.”
The Office of Special Investigations was formed in 1979 to target people with past Nazi connections, said Casey Stavropoulos, a Justice Department spokeswoman.
So far, 73 people have been stripped of U.S. citizenship and 59 of those have been removed from the United States as a result of the office’s work. About 20 such cases have been filed against Chicago-area men.
In September the department announced a similar suit against Joseph Wittje, 83, of Bensenville, who is accused of having been a prison guard at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin in World War II. Wittje’s attorney is fighting the complaint.
Ukrainian police assisted in pogroms against Jews, escorted Jews to work duty, extorted money from them and, ultimately, assisted in the Nazi efforts to exterminate them, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
But while “a certain number” of Ukrainian Auxiliary Police helped the Nazis, there is debate about how many and how much they helped, said Robert Paul Magocsi, author of “A History of the Ukraine” and a historian at the University of Toronto.
Victims of World War II barbarity in Ukraine, including Jews, communists and Poles, often blamed Ukrainian police, but it is unclear if those police were actually Ukrainians or Germans posing as Ukrainians, Magocsi said.
The Nazis depended on the Ukrainian police to herd Jews into the L’viv ghetto and later to wipe out its population of 100,000 by sending them to extermination sites or forced labor camps in 1942 and 1943, according to an affidavit from OSI chief historian Elizabeth White.
“Osyp Firishchak and other members of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police were indispensable accomplices in the Nazis’ systematic and brutal destruction of the Jewish community of L’viv,” OSI director Eli Rosenbaum said in a statement.
When Firishchak applied for a U.S. visa in 1949, he lied about his alleged past, according to the complaint, and instead said he had worked as a laborer in a factory, a cooperative and a building firm. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1954, according to the complaint.
If a judge revokes his citizenship, Firishchak would face deportation proceedings, said an official with the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago.
