JERUSALEM — I came to Israel on a professional voyage. But I also took an unscheduled personal pilgrimage of my ancestry.

Krause

I’ve made this trip before, both to Israel and to my past. One cannot be

separated from the other.

My family tree has deep roots here. The story of my family is the story of Israel.

My father, a survivor of five life-and-death years in Hitler’s most efficient genocidal machine, Auschwitz, always said the only good to come of the Holocaust, of the murders of my aunts, uncles, grandparents and almost every other relative on both sides of my family, was the creation of the state of Israel.

Six million Jewish lives were systematically snuffed out before the world recognized the need for a Jewish homeland. That’s what my father told me.

Some of the few in my family who survived the Holocaust fought in Israel’s War of Independence. A cousin was born here. A great aunt, who left Poland before the Holocaust, protected her young children from Arabs who were about to attack their home on a downtown Jerusalem street.

I had come to this country twice before. At 15, I came as a high-school exchange student. At 22, I returned to report on the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.

And at 29, I was here again. This time I was to cover Independence Day. My assignment was to write about this tiny nation’s 40th anniversary and describe how its people celebrated Jewish freedom while struggling with the insurrection in its occupied territories of another people fighting for their sovereignty.

I eagerly accepted the assignment, telling my editors I wanted to write other stories, too. My trip coincided with Yom Hashoa, the Holocaust memorial day, and with the verdict and sentencing of John Demjanjuk, known as Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka death camp and John to his friends at the auto factory in Cleveland where he lived for 34 years before being stripped of his U.S. citizenship for lying about his World War II past.

The editors agreed.

For these stories, I knew I would have to do what reporters are expected to do daily, to separate the reporter from the person — at least until the story has been written.

— On my first day in Israel, I went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum, to report on the Yom Hashoa ceremony.

I went to my cousin’s home in Jerusalem before the ceremony. Sara was born in Germany. She moved with her parents to Israel just after the British mandate ended and Israel became a state.

Her father had fought in the War of Independence. Her brother was born here. Now a Canadian citizen, she came with her husband and three children to spend this year in Israel.

Yad Vashem’s courtyard was packed when Sara, her 14-year-old daughter, Deborah, and I arrived. A sign across a brick wall reminded everyone that the holiday was purposely set to coincide with the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, during which thousands of Jews fought off the better-armed Nazis who came to take them to their deaths.

While my father slaved in Auschwitz, his sister — Sara’s mother — and brother were in that ghetto trying to stay alive.

Somehow, my aunt and uncle survived, only to be taken to Auschwitz. Again they survived, to tell their stories to the next generation.

When Sara saw the sign at Yad Vashem about the uprising, she asked if I knew that her mother and our uncle had been there. I said I did. And then I went in search of Holocaust survivors who would describe for me the importance of commemorating the Holocaust and the uprising.

I stood on my chair to see President Chaim Herzog and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir describe the atrocities of the Holocaust and promise it would never happen again to the Jewish people.

As survivors lighted memorial candles, I thought of the time I lighted candles for my family at the Western Wall seven years earlier.

I pushed the thought aside. That was not my time to reflect.

The moment was for the thousands of elderly and young, tourists and natives, Jews from Ethiopia and Egypt, Australia and America, who came to remember the millions who perished in the Holocaust.

My memories would have to wait.

— On the sixth day, I went to Jerusalem’s convention center, Binyenei Ha’uma, where in a movie theater-turned-courtroom, three judges were to pronounce their verdict in the yearlong trial of accused Nazi collaborator John Demjanjuk.

My parents moved to Cleveland in 1954, two years after Demjanjuk made the city his home.

My parents entered the country after detailing the work in the death camps they had survived despite Hitler’s attempts to destroy all of European Jewry. Demjanjuk, the United States’ judicial system later decided, entered after lying about his wartime activities.

Four years later, my father lay near death in a Cleveland hospital from a second outbreak of tuberculosis, which he first contracted in Auschwitz. At the same time, Demjanjuk was working on an auto factory assembly line.

Demjanjuk, now 68, was accused of committing crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and crimes against persecuted persons.

Demjanjuk is a big, bald man with a Santa Claus belly.

As far back as I can remember, my father was always a thin man. He told me once that when he was in Auschwitz he weighed about 60 pounds less than the 140 I knew him to be.

I don’t think Demjanjuk and my father ever met, though it was possible.

My father, David Krause, was born on March 4, 1920, in Lodz, Poland. Demjanjuk was born on April 3, 1920, across the border in the Ukraine.

My father, who died three years ago, told me he saw the signs of Nazism heading toward Poland, so he took off for Russia for awhile. It was about the time Demjanjuk was serving in the Russian army.

In 1939, my father returned to Poland, where he was arrested by the Nazis and taken to prison for trying to take merchandise from his family’s clothing factory. The Nazis had proclaimed all Jewish-owned businesses to be property of the Third Reich.

He spent most of the Holocaust in Auschwitz.

Demjanjuk, according to Israeli prosecutors, became a Nazi collaborator while being held in a prisoner-of-war camp.

All of this I knew when I walked to the convention center to hear the reading of the verdict.

A long line of Israelis waited at the public entrance, hoping to hear the three-judge panel announce its decision. It was in that line my cousin Sara waited many times during the past year to enter and watch the proceedings.

I walked to the media entrance. I showed my identification card, opened my bag so soldiers could make sure I had no weapons and went inside.

An hour before the hearing was to begin, the room was filling up. Holocaust survivors, some of them witnesses against Demjanjuk during the trial, parents and their children, religious Jews dressed in the customary black coats and hats, all took seats.

Suddenly, guards carried Demjanjuk, holding him by his hands and legs, across the stage, because he said he had hurt his back.

Then his family walked into the hall. Demjanjuk’s wife, three children and son-in-law took their seats in the third row.

I sat five rows back, watching Demjanjuk’s children, my contemporaries, who grew up on the west side of Cleveland while I was reared on the east side.

Demjanjuk always maintained he was innocent of the charges and was the victim of a Soviet plot. Looking at his family, I wondered what they believed.

The battle to prove Demjanjuk’s innocence had become their fight. As he sat in a prison cell in Israel for more than two years, they rounded up supporters and money that they hoped would prove Demjanjuk to be the victim of mistaken identity.

They sat through the trial. I didn’t.

I only read newspaper accounts of the trial and heard the verdict as it was read in hours-long detail, describing the joy that judges said Demjanjuk took in torturing Jews as they walked to their deaths.

To the reading of the verdict, Demjanjuk’s family brought years of fond memories of life in Cleveland and a profound belief in his innocence.

To the same reading, I brought years of hearing scanty descriptions of my family, those who were killed in gas chambers or starved to death in ghettos. I brought fond memories of my father, who was repeatedly marked for death at Auschwitz.

And I brought no preconceived notions of Demjanjuk’s guilt or innocence.

I was not in the courtroom during the 106 sessions when prosecutors and defense attorneys presented their cases. All I knew, from talking to many people who followed the case more closely than I, was that Israeli public opinion was divided over the issue of his guilt.

So with hundreds of others, I sat for 12 hours, listening to the judges take turns reading an abbreviated version of their more than 400-page verdict. A few hours into the session, it became clear they had decided the man who had stood trial for more than a year was Ivan the Terrible, killer of 870,000 Jews.

Demjanjuk’s family had left hours before the pronouncement of guilt was read.

The crowd in the hall erupted with applause.

I watched the audience’s jubilation for a few minutes and then rushed out to talk to Treblinka survivors, Demjanjuk’s attorneys and Demjanjuk as he was walked out of the building.

There wasn’t a moment to think about my father.

— A week later, I returned to Binyenei Ha’uma to report on the sentencing of John Demjanjuk.

Again people lined up outside the building. Inside, there were more police and guards standing in the courtroom than there had been a week earlier.

John Demjanjuk Jr. tried to take a seat in the balcony that had been reserved for the media. Though many soldiers and some Holocaust survivors were seated in that section, police forced him to sit below in the seats saved for the family.

Other than his father, John Jr. was the only Demjanjuk in the courtroom that day.

He was surrounded by Holocaust survivors and their families when Judge Zvi Tal pronounced “the punishment of death” for Demjanjuk. And he was there when the crowd burst into song, declaring, “The people of Israel live.”

Moments later, I met John Jr. for the first time. We were face-to-face, at the end of a hall.

I introduced myself. “I’m Renee Krause, formerly of Cleveland, now a reporter for the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.”

I asked him what he thought of the verdict and sentence. I asked him what his family would do next. I asked him all the questions any reporter would have asked.

I didn’t ask what he was feeling deep inside. I didn’t ask him what it had been like to be the son of a man who for 11 years had tried to prove that he was someone other than the man the United States government and now an Israeli court declared him to be.

If I hadn’t been at the sentencing as a reporter, I would have asked those questions.

Then some guards came and escorted John Jr. through a door. I didn’t see him again.

I turned and walked out of the building.

On the way to the bus stop, I saw a crowd standing and talking about the verdict.

In the warm Jerusalem sun, I thought about the judges’ decision to put a man to death for complicity in 870,000 murders.

I recalled John Jr.’s face as he proclaimed his father’s innocence. Over and over again I saw the audience singing in delight at the sentence.

I wondered what my father would have thought.