It’s hard to pin down Nazi atrocities, as Canada’s speaker has just discovered

Anthony Rota, the speaker of the Canadian parliament, says he did not know that Yaroslav Hunka, right, had fought with a Waffen-SS unit when he invited the 98-year-old to attend Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s official visit on 22 September 2023. Photograph: Patrick Doyle/AP

In February 1987, I was sitting in a Jerusalem courtroom, listening to the most harrowing testimony imaginable from survivors of the Nazi death camp at Treblinka, in Poland, where an estimated 700,000-900,000 people were murdered in 1942-43.

The survivors, elderly and frail, were giving evidence in the trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-American alleged to have been a notorious camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible”. He was the one, they said, who operated the engines that pumped the gas into the gas chambers.