Watching him on the stand, Real Roth imagines his defense: “My heart goes out to you for all you suffered, but the Ivan you want was never anybody as simple and innocent as good old Johnny the gardener from Cleveland, Ohio … All this innocuousness disproves a thousand times over these crazy accusations. How could I be both that and this?” For Roth, the writer, Demjanjuk’s ordinary homelife was no kind of alibi. The frightening thing was precisely that a person can be both that and this—the monstrous killing machine and the caring family man. The doubles coexist; they do not cancel each other
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