Holocaust survivors unwittingly sold home to deported ex-Nazi

Holocaust survivors unwittingly sold home to deported ex-Nazi

When Jakiw Palij and his wife moved into their two-story red-brick home just off Northern Boulevard in Jackson Heights in 1966, he appeared to be like any other middle-aged Queens ­immigrant.

But the son of the couple who sold Palij the home told The Post on Tuesday that if his late dad, a Holocaust survivor, had known of the buyer’s World War II past, “I don’t think [Palij] would have gotten out of that house alive.”

Palij, who obtained US citizenship in 1949 under false pretenses, was a former Nazi collaborator who stood guard at the Trawniki concentration camp in Poland, where some 6,000 Jews were shot to death, their bodies burned, in one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust, according to US officials.

And the couple from whom Palij bought his home were Holo­caust survivors.

“They would have been horrified,’’ their son said.

It would take 75 years from the time Palij joined the Nazi Party’s bloodthirsty elite Schutzstaffel, better known as the SS — and eventually moved on to enjoy a comfortable life in America — for any semblance of justice to be served.

On Monday, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stormed a quiet, tree-lined block to finally arrest the decrepit, now-95-year-old war criminal and ship him off to Germany as per a 2004 deportation order.

Though he admitted to working at the camp, Palij has denied committing war crimes for the Nazis.

“I am not SS. I have nothing to do with SS,” he told The Post in 2013.

But the US Department of Justice scoffed that Palij was crucial in advancing the Nazi regime’s sickening genocide.

“By helping to prevent the escape of these prisoners during his service at Trawniki, Palij played an indispensable role in ensuring that they later met their tragic fate at the hands of the Nazis,” the DOJ said in a statement.

Born in the village of Piadyki, Poland — a part of present-day Ukraine that was seized by the Nazis — Palij at age 19 was recruited by the SS in 1943.

Jakiw Palij in 1949Jakiw Palij in 1949US Department of Justice via AP

He was sent to Trawniki in eastern Poland and trained as a private guard there with the ID number 3505, according to papers first filed by the DOJ in 2002 to revoke Palij’s citizenship.

The training camp was aimed at readying SS guards for “Operation Reinhard” — the Nazis’ code name for their plan to capture and murder 1.7 million Polish Jews.

As an armed guard at the camp, Palij “compelled the prisoners to work and prevented them from escaping,” the court papers said.

Although he isn’t accused of physically carrying out the murders, Palij was on hand on Nov. 3, 1943, when the entire camp prison population — some 6,000 Jewish men, women and children — were shot to death.

Some Jewish prisoners were momentarily spared to burn the piling-up corpses and scatter their remains into trenches before being shot dead themselves.

“Thousands of victims were forced to listen hour after hour to the gunfire and the screams of terror and pain of those who had gone to the executioners before them, knowing that they, too, were doomed,” Eli Rosenbaum, of the DOJ’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, recounted on a conference call with reporters Tuesday.

In the following years, Palij was promoted to the rank of Oberwachmann — or guard private first class — with the SS Battalion Streibel First Company.

In 1949, four years after World War II ended, he sought to immigrate to the US on a visa under the Displaced Persons Act, created to help refugees from post-war Europe.

Palij lied about his Nazi past on paperwork, saying he never served in the military. Instead, he claimed he had worked on his father’s farm in Piadyki, as well as at a farm and upholstery factory in Germany during the war.

It worked.

His visa was granted and he moved to the US in July 1949. Eight years later, he gained ­citizenship.

Investigators caught wind of Palij flying under the radar in the US after spotting his name on a roster of other Traw­niki-trained men about three ­decades ago. A fellow former guard also let slip that Palij was “living somewhere in America.”

In 1993, when investigators knocked on his door in Queens, Palij admitted to lying his way into the United States.

“I would never have received my visa if I told the truth,” he said. “Everyone lied.”

The home of Jakiw Palij in Jackson Heights, QueensThe home of Jakiw Palij in Jackson Heights, QueensAP Photo/Craig Ruttle

He also copped to having worked at Trawniki in 1943, the DOJ said, prompting a deportation effort that lasted decades.

As a result of the DOJ’s 2002 complaint, Brooklyn federal Judge Allyne Ross stripped him of his citizenship, saying in a 2003 order “the government has marshaled convincing evidence that defendant indeed served as an armed Trawniki guard, and that this service resulted in the persecution of civilians.”

A year later, an immigration judge ordered Palij to be deported to Ukraine, Poland or Germany — but the process was stymied for years due to other countries’ unwillingness to take him.

Palij’s presence in the US, however, no longer went unnoticed.

His Queens home was the site of perennial protests led by local Jewish leaders.

“I am starting to get used to it,” Palij, clad in blue Ralph Lauren pajamas and a bathrobe, told The Post during one protest in 2013, the same year his wife died.

He insisted he was conscripted as a teen when Nazi forces invaded his family’s farm and feared they would kill his young­er sister and mother if he didn’t comply.

“They told us we would be picking up mines. But that was a lie,” Palij said then. “In that camp they took us — 17-, 18-, 19-year-old boys. I am one of them. If you tried to run away, they take your family and shoot all of them.”

Palij’s removal became a priority for the Trump administration, which tasked Richard Grenell, his US ambassador to Germany, with finally making it happen.

“The president asked me to do this, so I made it a point to bring it up in every single meeting that we did, no matter what the meeting was about,” Grenell told reporters Tuesday. “[Trump] made it very clear that he wanted this individual out of the US.”

Jakiw Palij arriving in Germany following his deportation from the USJakiw Palij arriving in Germany following his deportation from the US.BILD EXCLUSIVE/Sebastian Karadshow/Josef Frank Weiser

Grenell explained that the German Foreign Ministry finally agreed to accept the former Ukraine national as part of its “moral obligation” — after resisting for years because he wasn’t a German citizen.

Strapped to a wheelchair, Palij said nothing as he was removed from his Jackson Heights home Monday, according to ABC News.

He reportedly yelled out in pain as he was loaded into an ambulance.

Palij was flown out of Teterboro Airport in New Jersey and landed in Dusseldorf, Germany, early Tuesday, officials said. He will be housed in a care home.

In Germany, Palij is unlikely to be charged with war crimes. Prosecutors there opened a criminal investigation in 2015 but closed it for lack of evidence.

Meanwhile, the son of the Holocaust survivors who sold Palij his Queens home said the deportation came “50 years too late.”

Additional reporting by Marisa Schultz, Igor Kossov and Wires

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