Queens, NY - Feds Can't Find Nation to Take Ex-Nazi

Queens, NY - Three years after he was stripped of his U.S. citizenship, a former Nazi camp guard still lives in Queens because no country will take him.
"Listen, I'm 84 years old; I'm not going anywhere," Jakiw Palij said outside his home in Jackson Heights. "Except a funeral home."
Palij - who is actually 83, according to court records - shambled out of his brick detached home wearing a bathrobe and appeared unsteady on his feet.
He said he has a date this week with Homeland Security officials who have been trying to boot him. "I have no country that will accept me," he said.

There have been negotiations with Ukraine, Poland and Germany, but those countries have balked at taking the retired draftsman.

The feds brought a deportation case against Palij in 2002, charging that he was a guard at the notorious Trawniki slave labor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and was also a member of several units that committed atrocities against civilians.
Palij has claimed he was forced into the service at age 18 and would have been killed if he refused. "I was nowhere near to any camp, I didn't hurt any Jews, anybody from Ukraine, Poland. Anybody."
A federal judge revoked his citizenship in August 2003, ruling that Palij had illegally obtained an immigrant visa in 1949 by falsely claiming he had worked on his father's farm during the time he was a Nazi guard.
Palij, who has exhausted all appeals, cannot simply be placed on a plane and dumped elsewhere.

If Palij is deported, he said his wife, Maria, likely will stay here because she suffers from Alzheimer's disease and is cared for by a home attendant.