No tears shed

Last week, a man convicted of 28,000 counts of being an accessory to murder was accorded three-quarters of a page in the obituary section of a major national newspaper. When my great-grandfather -- Gustav Neumann - died, no newspaper carried a story about this wonderful man. John Demjanjuk was a native Ukranian who spent many years living the proverbial American Dream in Cleveland before being recognized as a former murdering concentration camp guard. The conviction involved "only" the murders of 28,000 at the Sobibor concentration camp. Demjanjuk also had  been convicted of having been "Ivan the Terrible," a sadistic gas-chamber operator at the Treblinka death camp. More than 800,000 souls were murdered there -- among them, my great-grandfather. My only regret is that Demjanjuk died a natural death. He deserved one more painful and more public.