by Alan Levy
Sixty years after he told it, I asked Simon Wiesenthal what he thought of his joke now. ‘It may have been funny then, but it isn’t funny now,’ he replied. ‘Normally, when you have a problem, if you can make from it a joke, you can, with ten words, say more than in a book. But nobody could imagine what was Hitler. Yes, Pharaoh and Haman had hate, too, but Hitler had the technology of genocide.’ And little did Wiesenthal know that his mother and eighty-eight other relatives would vanish into Hitler’s boxcars, gas chambers, and ovens.
Implicit in this contemporary analysis of his own joke are two themes that recur in conversations with Wiesenthal. One is ‘humour as the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are oppressed to smile at the situation that pains them.’ In the 1960s and 1970s, Wiesenthal published several volumes of Polish underground humour clandestinely in Poland, but under the pen-name of ‘Mishka Kukin’ – not just to protect his serious image in the West, he explained to me in 1976, but also ‘because ninety-five per cent of Polish jokes in Poland are making fun of the government. I had to deal with communist authorities and they would be in trouble if they were giving information to someone who pokes fun at the regime. Even though everybody knew “Kukin” was me, they could pretend not to know.’
His other theme stems from his half-century of experience with genocide – too much of it first-hand – in which he has discerned that ‘in the whole human history, whenever a crime was committed against an innocent people, there were always the same six components:
‘Hatred is the juice on which those two monsters of human history, Hitler and Stalin, survived. In all countries of the world, most people want to live in peace. It is only the extremism of their leaders that makes them hate and develops their hatred. None of my “clients” – not Eichmann, not Stangl, not Mengele, and not even Hitler or Stalin – was born a criminal. Somebody had to teach them to hate: maybe the society, maybe the politics, maybe just a Jewish prostitute.
‘Dictatorship is the second component. What connects two thousand years of genocide? Too much power in too few hands. An emperor, a king; a pope, a bishop or archbishop; a president, a general, a committee or a commission like the Spanish Inquisition that has the power in a dictatorship of hatred needs . . .
‘Bureaucracy: not just people sitting behind desks, but people who follow orders to kill people. The ones who operated gas chambers or guillotines or ran torture cellars: they were bureaucrats who became murderers. The Germans of the 1940s had many of the same slogans as the Spanish inquisitors of the 1490s, and when the Russians took over from the Germans they used very often the same wording for their decrees. Even the Nuremberg Laws of racial purity11 were nothing new; they were a Spanish invention. But the Nazis only went back three generations while the Inquisition’s “Certificate of Good Blood” went back seven generations. No, my friend, Hitler invented absolutely nothing, but what he had going for him was the . . .
‘Technology of our times, which gave him the possibility to fulfil the dream of thousands and thousands of haters for many, many centuries: a world without Jews. If the Inquisition five hundred years ago had had the technology of Hitler, they would not have given Jews choices like “baptize or die!” or “baptize or go out of the country”. From the annals of the Inquisition, I find that around 1485, they were looking for an inventor to make a machine that could kill seven people all at the same time. Believe me, if they’d had the technology they wanted, no Jew would have survived in Spain, no Protestant in France, and maybe no Catholic in England.
‘A crisis or a war is the next component. In what other time is it easiest to kill innocent people? In a crisis, you need scapegoats and a diversion from your own problems. In a war, the country is closed and, even in a democracy, you have secrecy. So there is no way for people to look, see, and ask questions.
‘A minority as victim is the last component. It can be a racial, social, or political minority that the dictators and their bureaucrats – those with power, hatred, and technology – can hold responsible for a situation.’
Wiesenthal goes on to say that ‘when the Turks killed a million and a half Armenians almost a hundred years ago, those six components of genocide were there and they were there, too, when the Spanish Inquisition put twenty people on a stake and burned them. And I can promise you that Hitler has studied very carefully both those holocausts.’
To Simon Wiesenthal today, hatred is the fuse which he fears will ignite the next world holocaust: ‘Technology without hatred can be a blessing, though not always. Technology with hatred is always a disaster. What will happen to this world when the haters of today, the terrorists, come into possession of the technology of our time?’
When Wiesenthal reads of disarmament negotiations in Geneva, Vienna, Washington, and Moscow, he wonders whether ‘it is more important to reduce weapons than to reduce hate. I am more optimistic about their reducing weapons than about their reducing hate. Right now, we have the technology to kill each of us eight times. I like to think that, in my lifetime, the super-and not-so-superpowers can get together and reduce it to four times. Then I might die more hopeful for my daughter and grandchildren.’
Wiesenthal, who would experience both Hitler and Stalin, says today that ‘the biggest difference between the two as criminals is that Hitler told the truth about what he would do to Europe, what he would do to the Jews, but nobody believed him. Stalin lied about his genocide, about the gulag, and the world believed him, so he lasted longer and got to kill more people than Hitler did.’
In 1934 and 1935, Wiesenthal apprenticed as a building engineer in Soviet Russia. He spent a few weeks in Kharkov and Kiev, but most of those two years in the Black Sea port of Odessa, which he remembers as ‘a lovely city’ in the Ukraine ‘where I spent twenty-one months learning dictatorship from Stalin. When I saw what the Soviets did to their own people – arrests right and left – this was for me not only very good preparation for the Nazis, but also what would happen if we ever came under Russian control.’ What disturbed him almost as much at the time, however, was that ‘on the streets, all people looked alike: Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, even ethnic Germans. They wore the same clothes, they had the same faces set in the same attitude, they seemed to have the same character: everything under Stalin was drab and uniform. When Hitler came, he would have a hard time figuring out which were the Jews and which were the other “sub-humans”. I myself stood out in the crowd just by being me.’
Returning to Galicia at the end of his Russian apprenticeship, Wiesenthal was at last allowed to enter the Technical University of Lwów for the advanced degree that would allow him to practise architecture in Poland. For a while, he roomed on Janowskà Street: future site of the concentration camp in which he would live much of the war. Geographically, it was an easy stroll to the Technical University on Sapiehy Street, which also housed Loncki Prison, a future Gestapo torture centre. Even then, Jewish students took the long way around, bypassing Sapiehy Street, for its residents were Polish officers and officials, professionals and businessmen, whose sons comprised most of the student body of Lwów’s Technical and Agricultural Universities. These ‘gilded youths’ would fasten razor blades to sticks as weapons with which to attack Jewish students and leave them bleeding on the pavement.
‘In the evening,’ Wiesenthal recalls, ‘it was dangerous to walk Sapiehy Street if you so much as looked Jewish, especially at times when the young National Democrats or Radical Nationalists were turning their anti-Jewish slogans from theory into practice. And there was never a policeman in sight.’
What perplexed Wiesenthal was that ‘at a time when Hitler was on Poland’s frontiers, poised to annex Polish territory, these Polish “patriots” could think of only one thing: the Jews and how much they hated them. In Germany, at that time, they were building new weapons factories, they were building strategic roads straight towards Poland, and they were calling up thousands of Germans for military service. But the Polish parliament paid little notice to this menace: it
had “more important” things to do – new regulations for kosher butchering, for instance – which might make life more difficult for the Jews.’
The Technical University’s yellow and terracotta neo-classical main building stood behind a low stone wall with a high iron fence. Inside lay no sanctuary. In the upper hall were the offices of Professor Derdacki, for whom Wiesenthal did his diploma work by designing a tuberculosis sanatorium, and Professor Bagierski, who corrected many of his essays. Both were notorious anti-Semites. When Bagierski had to confer with a Jewish student, Wiesenthal remembers, ‘he seemed to lose his breath and stutter more than usual.’ In 1936, a roving band flung a Jewish student over the ornate balustrade just outside the dean of architecture’s office.
In 1937, while Wiesenthal was still formalizing his degree, the Polish Radicals proclaimed their provisional utopia: a ‘Day without Jews’, usually during examination periods, as a way to reduce the already tiny number of Jewish students. Though beribboned fraternity brothers lay in ambush with spiked clubs, the faculty wouldn’t grant make-up exams, so the Jews ran their gauntlet. On the ‘Day without Jews’, ambulances waited just outside the campus, which was off limits to the Polish police.
Poland wouldn’t mobilize against her real enemies until 31 August 1939, the day before Germany invaded. The country’s cavalry, booted and spurred, rode into gallant but hopeless action against Hitler’s tanks and dive-bombers. So much for ‘Polish romanticism’, which Szymon Wiesenthal experienced at the cutting edge. ‘Where are they now, these super-patriots who dreamed of a “Poland without Jews”?’ he would ask. ‘Perhaps the day when there would be no more Jews was not far off and their dream would be realized. Only there wouldn’t be a Poland either!’
In 1936, soon after his return from Odessa, Szymon and Cyla had married, though the threat of Hitler was enough for the couple, both nearing thirty, to defer bringing a child into their perilous world. Yet, even before he had his Polish diploma in hand, Szymon Wiesenthal was confident enough to open an architectural office in Lwów. He specialized in elegant villas, which wealthy Polish Jews and Gentiles were still building without even trying to read Hitler’s handwriting on their walls. ‘Right to the end,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘people surrounded themselves with possessions. They must have thought that somehow property would protect them. Maybe, in those days, I thought that way, too.’
While many architects in Lwów favoured façade over function, Wiesenthal’s thinking fell somewhere between the philosophies of two Viennese architectural pioneers: Adolf Loos’s ‘ornament is crime’ and Otto Wagner’s more reticent view that function can be ornamental. To Wiesenthal, ‘when you start from the outside, eventually you have to cripple function to fit façade. But when the function works, the façade will be absolutely right.’ The Wagner-Loos influence is just one reason why Simon takes particular pride in the day in 1990 when, decked out like a Medici cardinal, he received an honorary Doctorate of Architecture from the University of Vienna.
* * *
So far as Simon Wiesenthal knows, none of the housing he built in Galicia still stands. The two houses he remembers most fondly are the first and the last. Toward the start of his career in 1936, he built a rustic villa in Dolina for his mother and stepfather. His final commission came in early 1939 from ‘a very rich man, a nouveau riche Jewish man, who said to me when I asked what kind of programme he had for his house: “I buy this piece of land. I wish to make a house. You want to know my programme? I have many enemies. So my programme is that when my enemies see this house, they should die of envy.’”
Wiesenthal put everything he had into this job, which he finished just before 23 August 1939, when Hitler and Stalin signed a ‘non-aggression’ pact partitioning Poland between them with secret provisions for incorporating the independent Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the Soviet Union the following year. World War II began a week later when Germany invaded Poland from the west shortly before Russia invaded from the east. When the Red Army occupied Dolina, it paid the thirty-year-old architect a dubious tribute by picking ‘the best house in town’ for its regional commander’s residence and evicting Simon’s elders.
In late September, after the Red Army had conquered Galicia, plainclothesmen from the NKVD, the Soviet security police, rounded up Jewish ‘bourgeois’ merchants and industrialists, including Simon’s stepfather, who died in a Soviet prison. Simon’s mother came to five with him and Cyla in Lwów, which was now called Lvov in Russian. Though Daylight Saving Time hadn’t come to Europe yet, the Galicians got it first, for they had to set their clocks ahead two hours to conform to Moscow time.
In Lvov, Wiesenthal’s nouveau riche client’s enemies were envious, all right, so they denounced the man as a capitalist to the Russians, who could see the truth of it with their own eyes. Deported to Siberia, he never came back – and it could be said that, thanks to the house that Wiesenthal built for him, it was the client who died of envy.
Four weeks after Lwów became Lvov, everybody had to register for a new passport: ‘valid five years and renewable thereafter’, they were told optimistically. Anyone who declared himself a merchant or property-owner, however, was deported to Siberia. Jewish intellectuals – including doctors, lawyers, and teachers – had the designation ‘§11’ stamped on their passports, marking them as second-class citizens banned from living in large cities or anywhere within a hundred kilometres (sixty-two miles) of the border. A few months later, all holders of Paragraph 11 passports were deported to Siberia as security risks. Not too many survived the war.
Later, Wiesenthal would observe that one difference between Soviet and Nazi genocide was that the Russians liquidated the capitalists first and then the intelligentsia, but the Nazis did it the other way round in order to learn and master the Jewish businesses they took over. With his clientele depleted and materials pillaged by the Red Army, Szymon survived in Soviet Lvov not as an architect, but as a mechanic in a bed-springs factory. By bribing an NKVD commissar, he was able to obtain normal passports for his wife, his mother and himself.
In Lvov, all businesses and houses were nationalized; an occasional homeowner was allowed to stay on as superintendent of his former property – with tenants chosen by the government. No visitor was allowed to stay overnight without permission from the nearest militia post, which made frequent middle-of-the-night spot checks.
Next in the Sovietization process came shortages. Waiting in line for a loaf of bread took two to three hours; for a kilo (2.2 pounds) of sugar, four to five hours. A new industry arose: line-standing. One could hire a professional line-stander for several times the price of the goods. This, in turn, spawned a thriving black market selling sugar for twenty-five times the official price.
With Russian soldiers and officials sometimes buying out everything in a store and promising to pay later, and with their women buying nightgowns and wearing them as evening dresses . . . with jail sentences for coming late to work and constant parades and mandatory free elections to participate in, the people of Lvov accepted their latest ‘Liberation’ with resignation and almost relief. ‘It was not as grim as some of the others,’ Wiesenthal concedes, deflecting the pain with a Czech riddle about what would happen if the Soviets had fulfilled their dream of African expansion and taken over the Sahara.
Wiesenthal’s answer: ‘For two years, nothing would happen – and then they would have to import sand.’
By mid-1940, the arrests and midnight raids had ceased – and enough normalcy had returned that it was safe for Szymon’s design for a sanatorium finally to be accepted by Professor Derdacki. ‘With generally satisfactory grades’ on his tests, Wiesenthal was granted a diploma on 25 June and licensed as an architectural engineer. He gave up his job of twisting bed-springs to take a clerical post in a construction company which had little or nothing to erect. But an agricultural co-operative near Odessa needed outbuildings for feather-plucking, so Szymon returned twice to the city of his apprenticeship and worked hi
s way up to chief engineer of the firm.
‘I could still be happy designing huts for chicken feathers,’ he remembers, ‘because, back in Lvov, my work as an architect still stood – though the people I built for were gone. No matter how primitive they are, Russian people – even occupying soldiers – have great respect for property because they don’t have any of their own. But when the Germans came in 1941, I saw my houses demolished in seconds – and, with this, my world was already destroyed.’
3
Now begins the dying
When Polish Lwów became Soviet Lvov in 1939, the inhabitants found themselves in a vestibule of hell with a revolving door to the nether world, but at least a little hope of redemption. True, Simon’s stepfather passed through the revolving door to perish in Siberia. True, Simon went in an architect and came out a mechanic in a bed-springs factory; by 1940, however, he was working his way back up the ladder from a new bottom with the resilience which people in his part of the world have always needed just to survive. But a few weeks after he’d built all the chicken-feather huts that were wanted in Odessa and returned home to Lvov to seek new opportunities, the steel door to the outside world was bolted shut on 22 June 1941, when Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union.
Eight days later, when the Red Army left Lvov to regroup in the east, the city reverted overnight to its old Austrian name of Lemberg. But the first German invaders had more familiar faces, for they were the hated Ukrainians: auxiliary troops who had fled the Soviet side of a partitioned Poland for the German side and had been trained there. They celebrated their return with a pogrom that lasted three days and three nights. Any Jewish male they laid hands on was offered a choice of deaths: hanging, shooting, or beating. Others were trampled to death or crushed beneath the wheels of cannons. When the pogrom was over, 6000 Jews were dead.
