Deportation ordered; Sutton man's role at Warsaw massacre.

Byline: Lee Hammel

WORCESTER - A 92-year-old Sutton man has been ordered deported for lying on his immigration papers about his presence in Warsaw during World War II.

The U.S. Justice Department announced yesterday that the U.S. Immigration Court in Boston ordered Vladas Zajanckauskas, formerly of Millbury, deported to his native Lithuania. Immigration Judge Wayne R. Iskra found in his Aug. 2 ruling that Mr. Zajanckauskas served in a notorious Nazi unit that took part in the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, rather than spending the war as a farmer as he claimed in an application that led to his immigration to the United States in 1950.

Mr. Zajanckauskas will appeal the decision, Denise Ronayne, his granddaughter, said yesterday. Such an appeal can take 18 months to two years, according to Susan Eastwood, spokeswoman for the Justice Department's Office for Immigration Review.

If the decision from the Bureau of Immigration Appeals in Falls Church, Va., is unfavorable, then Mr. Zajanckauskas can appeal that to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.

"The whole family has been devastated of course," said Ms. Ronayne of Sutton. "We're maintaining that he did not do this, he did not go to Warsaw."

Samuel Hilton was anything but devastated. Mr. Hilton, of Scottsdale, Ariz., testified for the prosecution in U.S. District Court in Boston in January 2005 against Mr. Zajanckauskas.

Mr. Hilton, who was 75 when he testified, did not identify Mr. Zajanckauskas as being in Warsaw, but he described the horrors there - the murder of his 2-year-old sister, rapes and beatings that he said were committed by Lithuanians, Latvians and others who helped the Nazis in the ghetto.

"They say you have to have pity, but not for heinous crimes like that," Mr. Hilton said in an interview yesterday. "I feel sorry for his family. They didn't know about that.

"But for him," Mr. Hilton said of the deportation order, "he's lucky. They should have done that to him 50 years ago. He broke American law, he lied."

Mr. Zajanckauskas admitted that he lied on his immigration papers, but said while he did not spend the war as a farmer, he served at the infamous Trawnicki training and SS camp serving beer to the others there.

The Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations and the defense agreed before trial that it would not seek to strip Mr. Zajanckauskas of his citizenship if he had stayed at Trawnicki and not gone to Warsaw to liquidate the Jewish ghetto.

U.S. District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton convicted Mr. Zajanckauskas after a trial that included an April 17, 1943, roster of 351 Trawniki men that includes the name and identification number of Mr. Zajanckauskas as having been sent to Warsaw two days before the start of the Warsaw ghetto liquidation.

Ms. Ronayne complained of the difficulty, 60 years later, of finding evidence to refute that. Mr. Zajanckauskas' lawyers, Thomas J. Butters and Robert L. Sheketoff, could not be reached yesterday for comment.

Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of the Office of Special Investigations, said "Vladas Zajanckauskas was an accomplice in Nazi mass murder. Had he told the truth after the war, he never would have been permitted to enter this country."

Mr. Zajanckauskas was promoted twice in Trawnicki to be a noncommissioned officer.

The court did not release Judge Iskra's 41-page opinion, but the Justice Department said that he found that Mr. Zajanckausakas and the others at Trawnicki in German-occupied Poland "were trained to assist in all aspects of Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan to murder all Jews in Poland."

The judge ruled that Mr. Zajanckauskas participated in Nazi-sponsored persecution at Trawniki and in Warsaw when he was deployed there by the SS with other "Trawniki men" to take part in the liquidation of the Jewish Ghetto during Operation Reinhard.

Mr. Zajanckauskas "admitted that Trawniki men sent to Warsaw stood in the cordon to prevent Jews from escaping, guarded the transit square where captured Jews awaited transportation to labor and concentration camps, conducted house-to-house searches for hidden Jews, skirmished with resistance fighters, and took part in the shooting of some captured Jews."

Members of Mr. Zajanckauskas' own subunit, in which he was "one of the top-ranked individuals," committed "terrible crimes," including murder and rape, the judge ruled.

Thousands of Warsaw ghetto residents died in the fighting in April and May 1943, about 7,000 were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp to be gassed, and the rest of the 40,000 inhabitants were sent to Nazi concentration and forced labor camps.

The Immigration Court case was litigated by Office of Special Investigations trial lawyers William H. Kenety V, Stephen Paskey and Edgar Chen.

"It is a result of OSI's continuing efforts to identify, investigate and take legal action against participants in Nazi persecution who reside in the United States," according to the Justice Department.

Since OSI origin in 1979, it has won cases against 105 participants in Nazi crimes.

In addition, attempts by more than 175 individuals implicated in wartime Axis crimes to enter the United States have been thwarted as a result of OSI's "Watch List" program, that is enforced in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department said.

The action: U.S. Immigration Court in Boston ordered Vladas Zajanckauskas, formerly of Millbury, deported to his native Lithuania.

The allegation: Lying on his immigration papers about his role in the Warsaw Ghetto massacre during World War II.

The conviction: U.S. District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton convicted Mr. Zajanckauskas after an April 17, 1943, roster of 351 Trawniki men that includes the name and identification number of Mr. Zajanckauskas as having been sent to Warsaw two days before the start of the Warsaw ghetto liquidation.

The quote: `The whole family has been devastated of course. We're maintaining that he did not do this, he did not go to Warsaw.' - Denise Ronayne, granddaughter

ART: PHOTOS

PHOTOG: Photos/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CUTLINE: (PHOTO 1) Zajanckauskas is seen in this 2002 file photo. (PHOTO 2) A 1956 photograph from a naturalization document shows Vladas Zajanckauskas.