by Alan Levy
Still, when Simon wrote a book-length manuscript that became Sails of Hope: the Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus, he hesitated to offer it to publishers because ‘I feel when I give out that Columbus had a Hebrew interpreter, people will think I am absolutely crazy or else some Jewish fanatic. So I cannot publish the book. But then I have an idea. I was invited to lecture in Lisbon, so I am going to the Royal Library there and looking on the documents of Vasco da Gama, who was also looking for a way to India and really found it.6 He had also an interpreter for the Hebrew language. When I saw this, now I should publish.’
When Wiesenthal’s French literary agent, Charles Ronsac, sold Sails of Hope to six European publishers and Macmillan in America (1973), an editor in the New York office objected facetiously: ‘The Italian Mafia will kill us!’ and Wiesenthal said: ‘After this book is published, all Jews will have three holidays: Rosh Hashonah, Yom Kippur, and Columbus Day.’
Actually, the only problem came in Spain, where a Wiesenthal reference to three Franco families who sailed to the New World in 1510 was punctuated with: ‘Franco was a common Jewish name in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.’ This did not sit well with the fascist dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1892–1975) and Sails of Hope was banned in Spain. Wiesenthal says the reference was no accident and was, in fact, his way of thanking Franco for his reluctance to repatriate Jewish refugees who escaped to Spain during the war.
During my dialogues with Wiesenthal, I wondered what the Hebrew interpreter Luis de Torres, who was the first member of the expedition to set foot in the New World, might have said to the ‘Indians’ when the Pinta, Nina, and Santa Maria landed in the Bahamas on 12 October 1492: ‘Did he address them in Hebrew?’
‘That I don’t know,’ Simon said, adding deadpan, ‘But I can tell you what the Indians said back to the white man: “Now begins the tsuris.”’7
2
The many liberations of Szymon Wiesenthal
When Simon Wiesenthal turned ninety on 31 December 1998, many well-wishers thought he had already been eighty all year because his date of birth was in 1908 – but barely. Bare is how he was born half an hour before midnight on New Year’s Eve 1908 in his parents’ bedroom in the small town of Buczacz (pronounced Boo-tchotch) in Galicia, then the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now the western part of the Ukrainian republic. ‘Through half an hour, I am older by a year,’ he says with a laugh whenever an interviewer, subtracting 1908 from the present, overestimates his age. When the midwife emerged with the news that a healthy boy was born, Asher Wiesenthal opened a bottle of schnapps and, with a handful of relatives and neighbours, toasted a particularly Happy New Year.
The midwife dutifully registered Szymon’s birth in the town office, but his superstitious maternal grandfather, believing that 1909’s first-born would win God’s special favour, took the liberty of also enrolling him at the top of the new year’s book of life. The old man’s wife was something of a mystic, as befits a woman whose maiden name was Freud. She liked to take her grandchild on outings to various ‘miracle rabbis’ of Galicia and have special blessings bestowed upon the boy. ‘All my education before school was my grandmother,’ Simon recalls, ‘with her stories of rabbis and miracles. Through this education, I not only tend to think in a Talmudic way, but I can always reason with rabbis and other religious people because I speak their language.’
The map of Europe in 1909 was vastly different from (and in some ways similar to) the Continent we know now. There were no countries called Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, but there were prickly nations known as Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. Albania was a monarchy and Bulgaria and Romania were major powers. Poland was part of Russia, though the city of Cracow was Austro-Hungarian. Austrian might extended from the Alps southward into Italy (a vestige of the Habsburg dynasty’s reign until 1806 as Holy Roman Emperors) and nearly a thousand miles eastward from Vienna. With the annexation of Bosnia and Herzogovina a few weeks before Szymon was born, Austria – already a formidable naval force through its port of Trieste – ruled the Adriatic.
In the Austrian crown-land of Galicia – with its 1,700,000 Ukrainians, 1,000,000 Poles, and 800,000 Jews – smouldering tensions enabled the Viennese Habsburgs to divide and rule with deceptive ease. In Buczacz, however, Jews were no minority, for the land’s ethnic mix was reversed: of the town’s 9000 inhabitants, 6000 were Jews, 2000 Poles, and, at the bottom of the local ladder, 1000 Ukrainians, mostly poor and of peasant origin.
A Jew could hold his head up high in Buczacz, says Simon, though Galicia in general, he hastens to add, was traditionally the land of pogroms: ‘Nowhere else have the Jews suffered so much for so long.’ His own father used to tell him how a village priest, who loved his schnapps, but couldn’t always pay for his drinks, left his church key as security with a Jewish tavern-owner one Saturday night, promising to settle his debt out of Sunday’s collection. Next morning, when his Ukrainian parishioners couldn’t get in to attend mass, he told them: ‘The dirty Jew at the pub has locked you out. Go get the key from him!’ They did – by beating the Jewish pub-keeper within an inch of his life, smashing or drinking everything in his tavern, celebrating mass, and then extending the celebration with a little local pogrom, amen!
The Ukrainians of Galicia were descendants of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Cossacks whose leaders made an unfortunate alliance with the Grand Duchy of Muscovy (now Moscow) in 1641. It imposed the Czar’s yoke upon the whole Ukraine, a territory of 232,000 square miles, which exceeds the areas of France and England. Devoutly Catholic and fiercely independence-minded, the Ukrainians were neither the first nor the last people in the world to hold the Jews somehow responsible for their plight. To this day, Simon Wiesenthal is still battling Ukrainians – in Canada, the US, and elsewhere around the world, if not in the Ukraine itself.
Asher Wiesenthal, a 1905 refugee from the pogroms of czarist Russia, had established himself in Buczacz as a solid citizen trading in sugar and other wholesale commodities. Simon’s own memories of early childhood are pleasant ones of going to his father’s warehouse and erecting his first houses and castles with white sugar cubes. They were the Lego of yesteryear for one who would grow up to be an architect and ‘learn to build houses according to certain structural rules so that they could withstand an earthquake’ – only to change careers after discovering the hard way that ‘“The Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was the kind of earthquake for which there was no building code.’
Wiesenthal remembers, too, the Passover table with an extra, ornate cup set for the prophet Elijah. After a special prayer, Szymon – and later his brother, for this was the youngest’s honour – would open the door and leave it ajar, for, sometime that evening, the prophet was expected to enter the room and sip from his cup. In the same way that other children elsewhere in the world wait up for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, the Wiesenthal boys would watch the door with wide eyes that narrowed as the night wore on. ‘But, of course,’ says Simon, ‘nobody came.’ Their grandmother, however, insisted that Elijah really drank from the cup and, when they found it full, she would say: ‘He doesn’t drink more than a tear.’
* * *
With the outbreak of world war in 1914, Asher Wiesenthal, a reservist in the Austro-Hungarian Army, was called up to active duty and sent to the eastern front. There he died in combat in 1915 – fighting for the same cause for which Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler was soldiering on the western front. In a war that would cost the world eight and a half million deaths and nearly thirty-eight million casualties, Szymon and his brother wept for their father as the only one among many.
Around that time of bereavement, the town of Buczacz became a battleground. When the Czar’s Cossacks conquered Galicia, the bereaved Wiesenthals were forced to flee because, as Simon recalls, ‘someone told the Russians that my father was not only an enemy soldier who had died fighting Russians, but a refugee from Russia and therefore we were Russians who ki
lled Russians. We didn’t know what they would do to us, but we knew they’d find an excuse to do something, so my mother and brother and I escaped to the Austrian part of the empire and I was a refugee in Vienna for the first time around.’
They took rooms on the Bäuerlegasse in the Jewish quarter known as ‘Matzoh Island’ between the Danube Canal and the river. Both Wiesenthal boys started school in the Austrian capital where, from 1907 to 1913, the Austrian-born, possibly syphilitic Hitler had tried to show the world he was a painter. Twice rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts, Hitler noted that four of the seven professors who denied him admission were Jewish and wrote to the Academy that ‘for this the Jews would pay.’ And, in his autobiographical Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler wrote that Vienna was ‘the hardest, though most thorough, school of my life’ – the place where he learned his anti-Semitism from the ideas of the German nationalist Georg von Schönerer (1842–1921) and the utterances of Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna from 1896 until his death in 1910
Simon has few memories of his stay in Vienna as a six- and seven-year-old – except that it was a relatively happy time before the glory and jubilation of war gave way to hunger and defeat. A Jewish family whose patriarch had perished on the Russian front was welcomed and even honoured in a city that was thriving on wartime prosperity and patriotism even while Franz Joseph slowly breathed his last in Schönbrunn palace and the dead and dying piled up in cattle trucks on railway sidings throughout his doomed empire.
After Franz Joseph died on 21 November 1916, the Wiesenthal boys had a day off from school to watch the Kaiser’s black funeral coach crawl through the city, but they were hardly aware that an era had ended. The austere but beloved Kaiser (Emperor) had reigned for nearly sixty-eight of his eighty-six years. His twenty-nine-year-old grandnephew, who became Emperor Karl I, would preside irresolutely over the dissolution of the 640-year-old Habsburg monarchy, which had less than two years to live.
In 1917, the Russians retreated from Galicia and the Wiesenthals returned to Buczacz, where they were caught up in the swirl of history. ‘I come from a very windy corner of Europe. Our part of Galicia changed hands so often that I was six times “liberated” before I finished high school,’ Simon recalls with irony. ‘After the Cossacks liberated us from the Austrians and then the Austrians liberated us back, it was the Ukrainians’ turn to liberate us and, for three months after the armistice in 1918, eastern Galicia was the Western Ukrainian Republic. Then the Poles liberated us and we became Polish. After the Polish-Bolshevik War began in 1920, the Soviets liberated us. Then the Poles came back. To survive under such circumstances is a school, I tell you. Nobody could teach us anything new until, a couple of liberations later, we got Hitler.’
Of all the early ‘liberations’, the brief Ukrainian postwar interim was the most painful for young Szymon. Like their Cossack forebears, the Ukrainians robbed, raped, and killed, but their fuel was alcohol and their troops could drink the Czar’s army (as well as themselves) under the table. One afternoon, their high command gave the Jews of Buczacz an ultimatum to deliver 300 litres of schnapps by five o’clock or their homes would burn. Szymon and his brother and mother and every Jew in town scoured Buczacz for booze and, when the Ukrainian demand was met, they stayed indoors for the long night of revelry ahead.
The next day, as drunken soldiers still staggered and slept in the streets, women were afraid to venture outdoors, but Szymon’s mother thought it safe to send her ten-year-old son across the road to borrow yeast from a neighbour for baking. As Simon returned, a soldier on horseback gave chase and, just for fun, lunged at him with a sabre, slashing his right thigh. Simon collapsed, but neighbours carried him into his house. The doctor who stitched the wound had to reach his patient by a labyrinthine route through cellars and back yards. Wiesenthal still wears that scar across his upper thigh, but insists quite sincerely that ‘some of my best friends are Ukrainians. One of them saved my life in 1941.’
As the Red Army, founded by Leon Trotsky, overran the Ukraine, the newly independent Poles pushed the Ukrainians out of Galicia and went to war with Russia themselves. The Ukrainians’ various successors were less brutal, but scarcely benevolent. Attending the local academic high school (Humanistic Gymnasium, it was called) in the 1920s, Simon recalls, ‘we would get up in the morning not knowing which regime was in power. When we were asked to who we swore our eternal loyalty, we had to look at the picture on the wall above the teacher’s table. One week it was Lenin, the next there was a Ukrainian, and then it was the Polish Marshal Pilsudski. The Bolsheviks rounded up all the bourgeoisie and made them pay ransom. My mother and other Jewish women were made to clean up the local sports hall, which the Russians had turned into a stable.’ Memory of this humiliation still smarts; eyes and mouth narrow as he relates it.
As for the Poles, ‘they did not like us Jews – and that was no new thing. Our fathers had crept out of the confines of the ghetto into the open world. They had worked hard and done all they could to be recognized by their fellow creatures. But it was all in vain. If the Jews shut themselves away from the rest of the world, they were foreign bodies. If they left their own world and conformed, they were undesirable immigrants to be hated and rejected. Even in my youth, I realized I’d been born a second-class citizen.
‘A wise man,’ Wiesenthal goes on, ‘once said that the Jews were the salt of the earth. But the Poles thought their land had been ruined by over-salting. Compared with Jews in other countries, therefore, we were maybe better prepared for what the Nazis had in store for us.’ And maybe, he adds, ‘made more resistant.’
At the Humanistic Gymnasium of Buczacz – where Jewish parents and ambitious Poles sent their children to learn Latin and Greek in hope of going on to university in Lwów or Warsaw – Szymon met a comely dark-blonde Jewish classmate, Cyla Müller, a distant relative of the Moravian-born Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (who was, in turn, no relation to Wiesenthal’s maternal Grandma Freud). Szymon and Cyla fell in love and it was taken for granted by all who knew them, including their parents, that the high-school sweethearts would one day marry.
Though that day didn’t come until 1936, when Szymon was twenty-seven, the young couple kept close company even after Szymon’s mother remarried in 1925 and moved to the town of Dolina in the Carpathian Mountains, where her new husband owned a tile factory. Though his brother went with her, Szymon remained in Buczacz to finish his studies. He visited his family often and took to the Carpathian countryside with zest, riding horses and hiking as well as vacationing whenever he could in the mountain resort of Zakopane, where ‘in summer were the woods, sunshine, peace; in winter was good skiing.’
Early in 1926, in the final hour of which he turned eighteen, Szymon registered with the Polish military authorities for future conscription. The following year, however, his grandfather’s favour of enrolling him as the first baby of 1909 came home to haunt him. Two policemen arrived to arrest him for failing to register for military service in 1927. Facing jail or immediate induction, Szymon protested that he’d registered in 1926. This was to no avail: boys born in 1909 had to register in 1927. The 1908-model Szymon Wiesenthal was not their concern, the authorities said, unless this Szymon they had in custody could prove conclusively that he was one and the same. A Polish magistrate told Wiesenthal to produce two witnesses to swear affidavits that they knew him during the half-hour of his life that he purported to have spent in 1908.
Having to prove his existence hardly fazed the early Wiesenthal. Scouring Buczacz for ‘witnesses who’d remember, to the exact minute, something that had happened almost twenty years ago’, he found two neighbours who did remember the midwife’s announcement preceding the proud father’s uncorking a bottle of schnapps at midnight. That detail, says Wiesenthal, ‘convinced the magistrate and settled the matter, so my birthday was legally recognized and they had to look elsewhere for the younger Szymon Wiesenthal.’ Still, this first formal brush with bureaucracy set him thinking about his identity cr
isis: ‘What if it had not been New Year’s Eve? What if it had been just an ordinary night with no party, no witnesses? Then where would I be?’
His status clarified, he was now able to obtain a student deferment to study architecture – not at the Technical University in Lwów, the Galician provincial capital where there was a Jewish quota, but at the Czech Technical University in Prague. The golden city on the Moldau8 proved not only an architectural revelation, but also – in the post-World War I democracy that Czechoslovak President Tomáš G. Masaryk created with the help of his friend Woodrow Wilson – a truly liberating experience to a young Polish Jew who had been ‘liberated’ too many times by vicious anti-Semites.
It was in the student cellars of Prague that the gregarious raconteur his friends now know emerged from the shadows of caution and discretion to shine as a master of ceremonies and even a stand-up comedian. Later, back in Lwów, he would edit a satiric student weekly called Omnibus, which made fun of communists and Nazis and of which he suspects ‘the Polish Ministry of Interior must have a complete archive because every week the censor confiscated us for one reason or another’ – an offending cartoon or a biting feuilleton. ‘We had many a joke together,’ he recalls of his student days, ‘we who were young with life stretching before us.’ But Simon, at least, could sense the most ominous shadow enveloping Europe.
In 1932, Simon’s senior year, Adolf Hitler was storming the threshold of power in Germany and, near Prague’s ghetto of the golem9 and Franz Kafka, Wiesenthal was a regular attraction at a Jewish students’ cabaret. ‘You know,’ he told an appreciative audience of Jewish and Gentile students in the spring of that year, ‘we Jews have always managed to get something good to eat out of even our worst tragedies. After Pharaoh, we have matzoh for Passover. After Haman, we have Hamantashen10 for Purim. And, after Hitler, oh what a feast we’ll have!’
