After 67 years, Alexei Vaitsen says the image is still with him: a lean young death camp guard leading prisoners into the woods for a day of forced labour.

The scrap of memory in the mind of Vaitsen, 87, a Holocaust survivor confined to his fifth-floor walk-up apartment in the provincial Russian city of Ryazan, could alter the course of one of the last major Nazi-era war crimes trials.

Vaitsen says he's certain the guard was John Demjanjuk, 89, a former U.S. auto worker who is on trial in Munich on charges he helped kill 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor camp in Poland.

"My memory of him is concrete," Vaitsen, 87, told Reuters in an interview at his home, a two-room apartment crowded with Soviet-era furniture in Ryazan, 200 km (125 miles) southeast of Moscow.

Demjanjuk's defence team has voiced scepticism about Vaitsen's reliability and his failure to come forward previously.

But leaning from his armchair to peer at pictures of a young, crew-cut Demjanjuk from a Nazi-era document and a later photo showing a thickset, balding man in a tank top, Vaitsen said he recognised both as the man he remembers from Sobibor.

Vaitsen, whose name has also been transliterated as Aleksei Weizen, says he escaped from the camp in a 1943 uprising.

Listed by the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem as a survivor of Sobibor, Vaitsen is one of a dwindling number -- and the only one alive who claims he could recognise Demjanjuk from the camp.

Whether he will give evidence to the court is unclear.

Senior prosecutor Barbara Stockinger, spokeswoman for the Munich prosecutors bringing the case against Demjanjuk, said they were aware of his claim and were evaluating documents they had received about it after the trial began on November 30.

"It is too early to make an assessment at the moment," Stockinger said on Tuesday. "It cannot be ruled out that he will be called as a witness."

Defence dubious
Guenther Maull, one of Demjanjuk's lawyers, said Vaitsen had been cited in a German newspaper interview a couple of years ago as saying that he could not concentrate and that his memories were muddled.

"I think that someone who has for years said 'I don't know any more and everything is confused in my head', who is then led into a conversation and ends up saying something like this ... would not necessarily be the most credible," Maull said.

He said that if Vaitsen were to be called as a witness, other arrangements might have to be made because of his lack of mobility, such as sending a prosecutor and defence lawyer to question him in Russia.

Vaitsen's grandson, Alexander, said it would be virtually impossible for him to get to Munich. A long time soccer player who is proud of his former speed, Vaitsen has knee trouble and has not been out on the street in a year and a half.

"On May 9 he went out onto the balcony," said Alexander, referring to the holiday celebrating the anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany.

Vaitsen, who says he fought the Nazis as a partisan after the uprising at Sobibor, went on to make 998 jumps as a paratrooper in the Soviet Army.

He has a jacket studded with medals, but wore a chequered flannel shirt and slippers during the interview. His speech was halting and confused at times, but he was clear about the fate he wants Demjanjuk to meet.

"He should get the gallows, nothing less," Vaitsen said.

There is no death penalty in Germany, but Demjanjuk could be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison if convicted.

Haunted by the Holocaust
In different ways, both Demjanjuk and Vaitsen have been haunted by the events of the Holocaust and World War Two.

Vaitsen lost his parents, his sister and all four brothers -- most rounded up and killed as the Nazis swept eastward.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's government treated soldiers taken prisoner by the Nazis as traitors, and Vaitsen's grandson said he kept his time in Sobibor secret for decades.

He finds it "very difficult" to talk about it today, he said. "They took the prisoners and killed them -- old men, children. They destroyed everyone."

Demjanjuk fought in the Soviet army but was captured by the Nazis and recruited as a camp guard. He has acknowledged being at other camps but denied he was at Sobibor.

Demjanjuk emigrated to the United States in 1951 and worked in the auto industry. He was extradited to Israel in 1986 and sentenced to death after Holocaust survivors said he was "Ivan the Terrible," a sadistic guard at the Treblinka camp, but his conviction was overturned in 1993 after fresh evidence emerged.

He returned to the United States and lived in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, but was extradited again last May.

The trial has been slowed by Demjanjuk's health problems -- he has been wheeled into the courtroom and spent sessions lying under a blanket in bed, his eyes shut. His family contends he is too frail to stand trial.

Vaitsen said age, illness or the passage of time should play no role in the quest for justice. "That's meaningless," he said.

(REUTERS)