John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old man being held in a Munich prison, will stand trial on Monday, accused of assisting in the murders of nearly 28,000 people.<br /><br />Prosecutors in Germany say that Demjanjuk's crimes were committed more than 65 years ago as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland in 1943 and 1944 during the second world war.<br /><br />However, Demjanjuk, a Ukranian national, insists that he was simply an unlucky captive of the Germans during the war. Following Germany's defeat, he emigrated to the United States in 1946 to escape a brutal past.<br /><br />But hundreds of Holocaust survivors and their family members believe he was one of the death camp's brutal guards.<br /><br />Al Jazeera's Harry Smith reports.
