The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 253

-TOS ANGELES TIMES SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1999 A13 California and the West J) K-r: 7 I GKNAKO MOLINA Los Angeles Times Vivien Spitz, 74, says she has been haunted over the years by her experience as a stenographer at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Reliving Nuremberg's Horrors Is Crusade for One Who Was There nmnmim-wiil-Tiiffin-innTTiT iMil-wiiwiliiiWiliili)iinirlliiilniniMMlliiiiiiitliiifiiiiiwlniTMHl'riil iiii.niii.i.i in linn 11 ill ii.iliiiiiirii1itii'iiM History: So that others will not forget, trial stenographer recalls the atrocities she recorded after World War II. Photos by GIN A FERAZZI Los Angela Timet "Mountain Bob" Hepburn pauses to take in the surroundings on the way down from his remote cabin to Palm Springs. Life at the Top Palm Springs' Mountain Bob Aids Curious Tourists, Stranded Hikers By BOB POOL TIMES STAFF WRITER For 40 years Vivien Spitz tried to put the horror out of her mind. It was only when others started "13 AS A "I'm Catholic and half-German, and I was proud of my mother's German heritage," Spitz recalled Friday.

"We'd all seen the news-reels that showed the concentration camps. But I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe Germans were capable of doing anything like that." Details of a dozen horrific medical experiments performed on prisoners in such concentration camps as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Ravensbrueck, Sachsenhau-sen and Natzweiler convinced her otherwise. Eighty-five survivors and witnesses told of victims being locked in airtight decompression chambers that simulated a altitude with no oxygen. Of being placed for hours at a time in tanks of ice water.

Of forced inhalation of mustard gas and injections of malaria, typhus and jaundice. Of bone, muscle, nerve and limb transplants between living subjects. Of forced ingestion of seawater by experimenters trying to see how drinkable it was. Ever the perfectionists, the Nazis recorded every detail of the experiments with photography. "I would put my head down on the table and cry," Spitz said.

"Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, was on trial. He stared at me. His eyes bored right into me and sent a chill down my spine." Trial workers toiled five days a week at the Palace of Justice, one of the few buildings in Nuremberg, Germany, that hadn't been destroyed during the war. They stayed at the Grand Hotel, which also survived Allied bombing. Nazi sympathizers roamed through catacombs beneath the city.

One night several of them tossed bombs into the hotel dining room moments before Spitz and another stenographer arrived for dinner. The trials of the physicians were part of a larger series of trials involving 200 leading German military and government officials, 37 of whom were sentenced to death. Seven of those ordered to die by hanging were defendants in Spitz's courtroom. Five other defendants in that court were sent to prison for life and four received sentences ranging from 10 to 20 years. After the trial Spitz married a U.S.

Army captain. She has returned to Germany several times since the trial but has never revisited Nuremberg, Spitz said. "Friends tell me Germany has changed. But to this day I have a lot of trouble with older Germans who say they didn't know what was going on in the war. They knew," she said.

Hepburn trudges across Lizards Ledge during his "commute." i trying to put it out of their minds that she was willing to relive the I Nazi atrocities that had riveted her as a participant during the Nuremberg trials after World War II. Spitz was a stenographer assigned in 1946 to write down every word of a yearlong trial of 20 German doctors and three medical assistants accused of hundreds of concentration camp prisoners with inhumane medical experiments during the war. The testimony and the photographic evidence were so vivid and disturbing that Spitz cried through much of the trial as she recorded it in shorthand. For three years afterward, she struggled with nightmares that kept the horrors alive. So in 1985 when a history teacher at a public school near her Denver home suggested to students that the Holocaust should be called "the holohoax" Spitz was incredulous.

Opening boxes of Nuremberg trial materials she had saved, Spitz sorted through documents and photographs and began a one-woman crusade to set the record straight. Spitz, 74, was in Long Beach Saturday, where she revealed what she experienced in Nuremberg to professional stenographers who belong to the Deposition Reporters Assn. of California. Association leaders conducting a three-day conference for the group hoped Spitz could help teach deposition reporters how to remain dispassionate observers, no matter how personally revolting a legal case may seem to them. Spitz hopes to help convert her audience into a new generation of those determined to keep memories of the Nazi atrocities alive.

Most of those who experienced the Nuremberg trials are gone; only four of the 30 court reporters assigned to take down word-byword testimony during the 13 separate trials that made up the proceedings are still living, according to Spitz. Spitz was one of the youngest stenographers hired by the U.S. government to work at the trials. She had been eager to go. are in private hands.

Because they were considered so inaccessible, Hepburn was able to buy 15 acres at bargain prices over time, including a spot with a waterfall, his childhood dream. Stints as a handyman in town helped cover the bills. The fight against graffiti and litter united Hepburn with his Agua Caliente neighbors. Last year, the tribe began a major cleanup, evicting trespassers. Hepburn empathized because he had just kicked a homeless couple off one of his properties.

"Can you imagine saying to two people: "I'm sorry, you'll have to move. I just bought your cave," Hepburn said. "But, I did. They had no respect for the land." Instead of taking another handyman job, Hepburn joined the tribe's canyon cleanup crew last summer. Tribal officials say that he was soon promoted to ranger more for his way with people than for his mountaineering know-how.

"It was because he's personable. He likes to tell stories and do research," said James Taylor, tribal ranger director. "That he lives in Tahquitz is just a bonus." In his tours, Hepburn rattles off the names of chemicals in desert plants such as nordihydro-guaiaretic acid found in creosote with the same delight he takes in deciphering ancient languages. Hepburn never went to college and said he learned Greek through a mail-order course while he was stationed at the Marine base in Twentynine Palms. The book he's been writing for 14 years, "The Revelation of Jesus Christ: An Exegetical and Manual Commentary," is still a work in progress.

Hepburn is putting most of his efforts into his ranger job. It seems there comes a time when even biblical scholars on mountaintops start looking toward life in a retirement resort. "I'm 49 years old. I have to think ahead," he said. "Someday, I'd like to have a house in Palm Springs that is down in Palm Springs." By DIANA MARCUM SPECIAL TO THE TIMES PALM SPRINGS-Before Mountain Bob joined the workaday world, he was a local legend.

He climbed like a bighorn sheep. He kept coming to the aid of lost hikers. And he lived alone in a cabin he built by himself high in Tahquitz Canyon, a spot most people need a helicopter to visit Soon, Bob Hepburn could not make his weekly trek down to a grocery store in this resort and retirement hub without people pointing at him and whispering "Mountain Bob." But last month, Palm Springs' fabled loner came down from the mountain, donned a crisp khaki uniform and started giving nature talks to tourists at three canyons owned by the Agua Caliente Indians. He's now Tribal Ranger Mountain Bob at least for a 10-hour workday, until he scales the granite cliffs to his cabin three miles away. "My love of nature and wanting to protect the canyons is innate," said Hepburn, a blue-eyed 49-year-old with a silvery, trimmed beard.

"Being a ranger brings it all together." He ditched civilization and the pressures of life in the flatlands 15 years ago, he said, so he could follow his passion of interpreting the Bible from ancient languages. If there is more to the story of why a man chooses the loneliest of lives in the most rugged of landscapes, Hepburn isn't telling. He grew up in Reseda, served in the Marines in Vietnam and then held jobs as a salesman while studying languages. He has never married. "It takes so much time just to support yourself," he said.

"So I came up with this plan of living in the wilderness." He has gone from sitting alone in the woods studying Greek, Latin and Sahidic Coptic to explaining the medicinal value of the Santa Yerba bush to 40 sightseers. Luckily, Hepburn is a hermit with good people skills. He laughs easily and heartily. He Oden brought a Domino's pizza, the only thing Hepburn has ever had flown in. Hepburn said he carried every piece of the cabin structure, every biblical reference book, soup tins, water bottles, his guitar, even a mattress and dresser, on his back.

He cooks macaroni and cheese over an open flame, and roasts a turkey on Thanksgiving. He has a kerosene lamp and a battery-operated radio. He uses a cave as a study room. He bathes in a nearby stream. "That's one thing I've never gotten used to: 42-degree water," Hepburn said.

Even at night, he easily navigates a trail that most people cannot climb in daylight. Last week, he sprinted through darkness back to his cabin to call for help on his ranger walkie-talkie after he discovered two teenagers stuck on a cliff, one of dozens of rescues in which he has played a part. The Palm Springs Mounted Police Search and Rescue squad lists the area among the most dangerous in the country. Most of Tahquitz Canyon belongs to the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians, but checkerboard parcels at high elevations comes from a family known for engagement in the world: One brother is president of the police union in Los Angeles, and a grandfather was the national leader of the Salvation Army. Dave Hepburn, head of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, runs, works out regularly and backpacks.

He expected to visit his brother's tiny, one-room cabin with little problem, but describes the climb as "one of the most horrible experiences of my life" and vows never to do it again. "I pictured walking up a dirt path, but you lcse the path a quarter of the way up and you're climbing from rock to rock. You cross a river, and the going keeps getting steeper and steeper until you're crawling up with your hands and feet," Dave Hepburn said. "And there's my brother, who's more of a mountain goat than a human, telling me, 'C'mon it's just over the next It took us five hours." Palm Springs City Councilman Ron Oden visited Hepburn's tarp-roofed cabin by helicopter. From the air, Oden said, the cabin was almost invisible amid cliffs, marked only by a small clearing and an American flag.

lew Program to Help Protect Domestic Violence Victims J) Commission on Assault Against Women, a private victim support organization. "They cannot talk to their families or friends. They cannot go to the grocery store and use an ATM card. They're not able to have a phone. They cannot go back to where they worshiped." The era of hacking electronic databases further compounds the difficulties of victims.

"With the advent of computer technology, it is even harder for women to hide," said Jacqueline Keller of the California Alliance Against Domestic Violence, a statewide association of women's shelters and legal aid programs. In 1991, Washington state started its program, the first in the nation, in part because legislators feared that the state might be liable in cases of abusers tracking down victims through public records. The Washington participants, who also include victims of sex crimes, receive a fictitious street address and a post office box operated by the secretary of state. Several other states, including Massachusetts, New Jersey, Florida and Nevada, have devel- ning, trying to keep themselves one step ahead of a former spouse or boyfriend," said state Sen. Dede Alpert (D-Coronado), author of the law that was passed last summer.

Supporters agree that the law will not guarantee total safety, but Jones said it will give victims an "additional layer of security they need to protect themselves and safeguard against further attacks." Modeled on a pioneering effort by Washington state, the California confidential address program will begin enrolling an expected 4,000 participants this summer. During its first year, the program will cost an estimated $519,000. Program participants will be provided a post office box, which will be emptied daily by employees of the secretary of state. Participants' mail will be forwarded to their confidential addresses. At the outset, said project manager Shirley Washington, the post office box will be used for correspondence from schools, courts and state and local government agencies.

Later, businesses and other private organizations will be encouraged to recognize it as a par- ROBERT DURELL Los Angela Time State Sen. Dede Alpert, author of legislation taking effect July 1 that will offer new protections to victims, with state Sen. John Vasconcellos. Law: To keep whereabouts a secret, those fleeing abusers will be able to obtain special post office boxes and keep certain information confidential. By CARL INGRAM TIMES STAFF WRITER i SACRAMENTO-California is embarking on an innovative program to protect victims of domestic violence, mostly women and children, from being tracked down by their attackers and harmed again.

i Starting July 1 under a little-noticed new law, survivors fleeing domestic abuse will be offered a free post office box for mail forwarding by Secretary of State Bill Jones. For an extra measure of security, certain records that are normally public such as voter registration information will be made confidential, although they can be opened by court order. "So many of these women just wind up going underground, run- ticipant's official address. Under the program, domestic violence will be defined as "the willful infliction of corporal injury resulting in a traumatic condition perpetrated against a spouse, cohabitant or person with whom the perpetrator has a child." Participants' must be able to document that they have been victims of domestic violence and sign a statement declaring that they fear for their safety or their children's. However, the law prohibits victims from using the confidential address as a shield to avoid court orders relating to child custody, visitation, support or other issues.

Domestic abuse survivors typically dread leaving a trail of paper or computerized information that could identify their new locations, victim advocates say. As a result, many victims do not enroll their children in school, register to vote, open bank accounts, order telephone service or obtain credit cards. "They have to continue to live in fear, literally dropping out of sight and starting all over again," said Leah Aldridge of the Los Angeles oped similar programs. The Washington program has 1,147 participants, at an annual cost of $200,000, said program manager Margaret McKinney. Children are 53 of the participants, women 45 and men 2, she said.

McKinney said that in most cases the victim has moved and must start from scratch, getting a new driver's license, initiating child support actions and applying for food stamps. All require the applicant to list a name, address and telephone number. In Washington, the personal in -1 formation is suppressed and the participants' mail is forwarded. Alpert, whose bill (SB489) passed the Legislature unanimously, said the program represents an "honest-to-goodness effort by government to try to assure that these women who have been victimized are not victimized again." A.