MUNICH -- Rudolf Salomon Cortissos sobbed as he told a Munich court about the letter his mother had written on May 17, 1943 - four days before she was gassed in the Nazis' Sobibor death camp with about 2,300 other Dutch Jews.
Cortissos testified on Tuesday, the second day in a German court for John Demjanjuk, the retired Ohio autoworker being tried on charges of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews in the Sobibor camp, including Cortissos' mother, Emmy.
Sitting only feet away from Demjanjuk, Cortissos testified that he found her letter after his father died in 1959.
His mother had tossed it from the train that was taking her from Holland before it crossed the German border, Cortissos said. The family had been in hiding, but she had been picked up in a sweep after going outside.
In neat handwriting, on a single piece of yellowed paper folded into quarters, Cortissos' mother told the family she was being sent east to work - a lie propagated by the Nazis so people would be less likely to resist.
"I promise you I will be tough, and I will definitely survive," she wrote in what turned out to be her final words to her family. She signed off: "Hope to see you again soon. Bye-bye. Many kisses."
Demjanjuk, 89, was deported from the United States in May to stand trial in Germany. He rejects the charges, saying he has been mistaken for someone else.
Demjanjuk - who suffers from several medical problems - was wheeled in to the Munich state court on a gurney Tuesday, slightly propped up lying on his back. He arrived much the same way on Monday, the day the trial began.
A blanket covered his legs, and his leather jacket was zipped up to his neck. As Cortissos told his story, Demjanjuk kept a blue baseball cap low over his face and had no visible reaction.
The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk maintains that he was a Soviet soldier captured by the Germans and that he spent most of the rest of the war in prison camps.
But prosecutor Hans-Joachim Lutz told the five-judge panel he would seek to prove that Demjanjuk volunteered to serve the Nazis once he had been captured and that he was a willing participant in the Holocaust.
Lutz told the court that Demjanjuk learned how to be a guard at the SS training camp at Trawniki and was then posted to the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in March 1943.
