Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  On the heels of the Ukrainians came the Einsatzgruppen, SS ‘Special Action Groups’ which entered behind Hitler’s conquering armies and whose only combat mission was to destroy civilian ‘enemies’, starting with Jewish intellectuals, communists, and gypsies. First unleashed in Austria and Czechoslovakia, they were the brutal fist that hammered home Hitler’s furious words to an incredulous world.

  ‘On the first of July,’ Simon recalls, ‘I was in the apartment of a friend, around eleven in the morning, when we heard a loud screaming in the street. We went to the window and saw German soldiers and Ukrainian civilians insulting Jews in the street, dragging Jews from their homes, undressing and beating them. Two civilians and a soldier were beating six Jews with sticks. Near the curb, a boy of twelve or thirteen had been knocked down by a soldier, who was now kicking him in the head with his army boot. A few yards away, two women were lying on the ground; their hair had been pulled out and it was lying beside them.

  ‘A few minutes later, a group of about sixty unsuspecting Jews wandered into this scene from a side street and were greeted with sticks and stones by the Ukrainians and beaten with rifle butts by the Germans. But suddenly the beatings stopped. An open car – I think it was a Mercedes – arrived with a German general wearing gold braid on his shoulders. He was standing up in the car and a cameraman was filming him. The soldiers all stood at attention and gave him a military salute. The people they were beating had to stand up straight and give a Heil Hitler salute. The general waved and, when the car pulled away, the beatings resumed.’

  Wiesenthal stayed out of sight during the pogrom and was playing chess in the cellar of his house with a friend on Sunday afternoon, 6 July 1941, when a Yiddish-speaking Ukrainian policeman barged ‘right through the front door and went downstairs to tell us to come with him,’ Wiesenthal recalls. ‘We were on a list he had and he made it sound like we should be honoured.’

  The two chess players were taken to Brigidki Prison. In a courtyard, some forty other Jewish professional men were standing around: lawyers, doctors, engineers, and teachers. Wiesenthal and his friend were invited to join them. ‘Later,’ says Simon dryly, ‘they would throw the same sort of garden party for the Polish intelligentsia of Lwów’ – mostly university professors plus one of Poland’s best-known writers, Tadeusz Boy-Ẑelénski.

  The centrepiece of the courtyard was a table covered with bottles of vodka, sausages, plates of hors d’oeuvres, and bullets. For their crimes of being Jewish and educated, the guests would partake only of ammunition.

  Some wooden crates were brought in: one for each Jew to stand next to. Lined up facing a wall with arms crossed behind necks, they were shot one by one in the neck by a Ukrainian executioner. After killing three or four men, he would go over to the table and help himself to a drink and some food while another Ukrainian reloaded the weapon. Two other Ukrainians would shove each body into a crate and haul it away.

  Seeing men he had known for years crumple, bleed, and die in seconds before his eyes, and knowing that their fate awaited him, too, Simon Wiesenthal realized that he was no longer a hostage to the random, often drunken, violence of the Ukrainian cavalryman who had slashed his thigh as a boy in Buczacz, or the Polish fraternity men who lay in ambush for Jewish students outside the Technical University. ‘What I saw for the first time,’ he told me, ‘was systematic extermination that had no motive except to kill every Jew, starting with the ones who looked the most dangerous to Hitler. And done by people who took real pleasure in killing us.’

  As the shots and shouts of the boisterous Ukrainians drew closer to Wiesenthal, he heard a new sound: church bells. The Ukrainians heard it, too. Good Orthodox Catholics all, they laid down their arms for evening mass.

  Wiesenthal and his friend had stood five or six bullets away from extinction. Reprieved overnight, they and eighteen other survivors were marched to two large cells where their belts and shoelaces were taken from them. Suicide was forbidden; not for the last time would Wiesenthal learn that, under the Nazis, a Jew could not choose when to die.

  During the night, as Simon dozed uneasily on the floor, a flashlight picked him out and a faintly familiar Ukrainian voice said in Polish: ‘Engineer Wiesenthal! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Who are you?’ Simon asked the beam of light.

  The man behind it was his former construction foreman, Bodnar, remembered by Wiesenthal as ‘a very good stonemason I tried to use on every building I built.’ Though Bodnar now wore the arm-band of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, he was still loyal to his former employer.

  ‘I’ve got to get you out of here,’ he whispered. ‘You know what they’ll do tomorrow morning.’

  Wiesenthal asked him to help his chess partner, too. Thinking aloud, Bodnar mused: ‘The important thing is to get you out of this building, no matter what the excuse.’ He decided to tell his Ukrainian bosses that he’d unmasked a couple of very important Soviet spies among the Jews in custody. ‘I’ll ask them whether to take you to Sapiehy Street or Academy Street for further questioning,’ Bodnar told them. ‘Either way, once I get you out of this place, I can lose you.’ Sapiehy Street, where the Technical University lay, also housed Loncki Prison, which the Gestapo was converting to a ‘research centre’: a Nazi euphemism for torture chamber. Academy Street meant the Ukrainian commissar’s headquarters.

  An hour later, both prisoners were dragged from the cell and mauled by their Ukrainian jailers for a decent interval – long enough for Wiesenthal to lose two front teeth – until Bodnar shouted: ‘Enough! We need names and information from them before we kill them.’

  On their way out, Bodnar tried to tiptoe past the courtyard where the execution squad, having prayed but not having put away their weapons, were still finishing their food and drink by candlelight while celebrating their day’s accomplishments. They were oblivious to all, but had been joined by a German sergeant, who spotted Bodnar and his prisoners and asked where he was taking them. Bodnar, who spoke no German, told Wiesenthal to answer.

  In his best German, Simon told the sergeant: ‘This is a Ukrainian policeman. We are Jews. He should bring us to his commissar.’

  The German sergeant, already a little drunk, slapped Bodnar’s face and said: ‘Then what are you standing around for? If this is what you people are like, then later we’ll all have troubles. Report back to me as soon as you deliver them.’

  ‘Safely’ outside, Wiesenthal apologized to Bodnar for the abuse he’d caused him. Bodnar was more concerned, however, that now he had to account, verbally at least, for his two prisoners.

  They trudged through the silent streets of Lemberg, where there was now a curfew for Poles and an earlier one for Jews. Bodnar took them past the sentry at Ukrainian headquarters and deposited them in the commissar’s office, which Wiesenthal and his friend proceeded to clean. When the commissar arrived that morning, he asked them what the hell they were doing there.

  ‘A German sergeant sent us over to clean your office,’ said Wiesenthal, ‘and it was too late for us to go home when we were finished.’

  ‘So go home,’ the Ukrainian said brusquely, though obviously pleased that he mattered so much to his German masters. Wiesenthal and his friends were home in time for breakfast.

  Now the revolving door whirled so fast it was coming unhinged. Three days later, Wiesenthal was netted in a round-up of able-bodied men for work details. He and a hundred others were sent ‘to a storage ground where they broke us into small groups and had us move armour plates from one place to another. These plates were too heavy for us to lift, particularly when we were being beaten by two German soldiers to encourage us. One of them was from Leipzig and he kept saying he’d known lazy Jews in Leipzig, too, and had settled their accounts. The armour plates had very sharp edges that cut our hands, but the soldiers wouldn’t let us wash off the blood or put something on the wounds. We worked without a midday break while the two soldiers took turns having lunch.

  ‘In the afternoon, they had us c
arry heavy oxygen bottles, some of them weighing ninety to a hundred ten kilograms (198 to 242 pounds) for a distance up to three hundred metres (985 feet). We worked in pairs and, late that afternoon, one couple stood still for a while and were beaten by both the soldiers. One of the men fell and was kicked some more in the face. He lay on the ground unconscious. His partner was sent to work in another group. When we went home in the evening, he was still lying there and we never saw him again. It was nine o’clock – an hour past curfew for Jews – so they gave us passes to go home and report back there next day.’

  His life, his career, his hours, days, and sometimes his nights were no longer his own. Then the Germans started building a ghetto with Jewish labour. Wiesenthal remembers this phase well:

  ‘First, they fenced off part of the old town . . . Next, they pulled out the cobblestones, turning the streets into a quagmire. That was part of the systematic method of creating sub-human living conditions. On rainy days you couldn’t cross the street without wading in mud up to your ankles. It was impossible to clean oneself. We must have looked like animals, or phantoms from a nether world. And on the worst days, SS leaders and army officers would arrive, with some women, in their big cars, and they would watch us and laugh and take photographs of the strange species of sub-humans. They sent these pictures home, and everyone said, “Look at those Jews! Hitler is right! They aren’t even human.’”

  The Wiesenthals and his mother managed to stay out of the ghetto until late summer, when an SS man sauntered into their apartment with a Polish prostitute on his arm. Looking right through them, the whore sized up their flat and said, ‘Yes, it’ll do.’ An hour later, the Wiesenthals went to the ghetto, leaving all their heirlooms behind. The new mistress of the house wanted to take it furnished.

  A little more than a month later, on 21 October 1941, the SS held a ‘registration’. Simon Wiesenthal had learned the new meaning of the word: ‘The more often they registered us, the fewer we became. In SS language, registering was not a mere stocktaking. It meant much more . . . From bitter personal experience, we mistrusted words whose natural meaning seemed harmless. The Germans’ intentions toward us had never been harmless.’

  Simon and Cyla were sent to Janowskà, a concentration camp the Germans were developing in the sands and woods of Lemberg’s western city limit. His mother was permitted to remain in their seven square metres (eight and a half square yards) of ghetto squalor. At their hasty parting, Simon gave her ‘the last of what we had: a gold watch’ in case she needed to buy her safety.

  The gateways to hell were segregated by sex. Loaded on to separate trucks and herded by Ukrainians and Askaris (Soviet prisoners of war who’d gone over to the German SS), Simon and Cyla were driven to the men’s and women’s camps of Janowskà. In each case, the vestibule was a shack where a pair of German officers ordered the prisoners to give up the few belongings they’d brought with them and state their names, ages, and work qualifications. Then, after cursory physical examinations, they were sent through the back door into Hades.

  Each prisoner’s bread ration was three ounces per day. At the end of a hard day’s labour enlarging the camp, quarrying stone, digging burial pits for the day’s dead, or (when there was no work to be done) breaking ground and then restoring it or carrying heavy stones from here to there and then back again, the men would stand evening inspection – and those who were visibly sick would be barred from the barracks ‘to prevent infection of the healthy’. Instead, they would spend the night out in the cold taking what the Germans called ‘a fresh-air cure’. After eight at night, there was a curfew, and the Askaris on the watch-towers had orders to shoot anyone who stood or moved, so the condemned men had to lie on the frozen ground all night. In the Galician winter, none of them arose in the morning, for the ‘fresh-air cure’ was fatal. Some, however, took a short-cut to oblivion by standing up in the night and inviting the Askaris to shoot them. The Askaris always obliged.

  In Janowskà’s early days, escape attempts proliferated even when the number of captives executed for each try was doubled from five to ten. The first successful escape meant twenty-five camp killings plus even more drastic consequences: a truck drew up to the man’s home in the ghetto and took his entire family – plus some visitors who had dropped by – to the camp as hostages awaiting his return. They were placed in solitary confinement without light or food. Their ordeal lasted three days – until the remorse-stricken escapee returned and was beaten to death before the eyes of his family and their friends, who were then released. The next time a man escaped, the procedure was repeated. After three days, when he hadn’t turned himself in, his mother, sister, niece, sister-in-law, and a neighbour’s child were shot to death. After that, escape attempts were few.

  Toward the end of 1941, by coincidence, Simon and Cyla Wiesenthal were both transferred to a special forced labour camp near the Lemberg railyards. A satellite of Janowskà, it lodged prisoners serving the Eastern Railroad Repair Works. Cyla was sent to the locomotive workshop to polish brass and nickel. For a while, she saw Simon daily, for he was put to work painting swastikas on captured Russian locomotives. When he was promoted to sign-painter for the entire Eastern Works, she saw less of him, but his new job won him a mobility that would later save their lives.

  Wiesenthal’s work – and the man himself – caught the eye of the Eastern Works’ head railwayman, Heinrich Günthert, a civilian, ‘because he always walked with his head up and looked me straight in the eye.’ Günthert subsequently told Wiesenthal’s postwar Boswell, the late Joseph Wechsberg: ‘The SS men said that Wiesenthal was impertinent. I didn’t argue with them, but I admit that I was impressed by the man’s erect bearing. He had a thoughtful expression in his eyes, as though he knew that we Germans might one day have to account for all this.’ With God on leave and His anointed deputy, Pope Pius XII, strangely silent, it seemed as if Simon, little thinking he would ever survive the war, had already stepped into the shoes of Deputy for the Dead.

  Upon learning that Wiesenthal was a licensed architect, Günthert – a Nazi who’d already had trouble with the SS guards for treating his Jewish labourers humanely – gave him work as a technician and draughtsman. Günthert’s deputy, Adolf Kohlrautz, also a Nazi, not only shared his chief’s attitudes, but was immensely grateful for the praise and promotions that came his way thanks to Simon’s technical drawings, which were submitted under Kohlrautz’s name. Kohlrautz would tell Simon the news he’d risked his neck to hear over the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and smuggle food to Simon’s mother in the ghetto.

  The ghetto, not the Janowskà camp, felt die first wave of organized deportations to unknown destinations; in Janowskà, you generally finished your life there, sooner or later. Those ‘privileged’ to remain in the ghetto were mothers and children as well as older people. The more able-bodied among them, however, were forced to labour outside the ghetto by day, during which SS body-snatchers would raid the compound to relieve it of ‘non-working, useless mouths’. A woman might return home from a hard day’s slavery to find her children gone forever. After desperate mothers managed to conceal their children in stoves and closets or behind false walls, the SS police chief of Lemberg, Friedrich Katzmann, tried another tactic. He announced a relaxation of discipline and, as a token of good faith, he opened a kindergarten for ghetto children. It offered extra rations of milk and cocoa.

  The mothers watched warily, but first their hungry children and then their own aspirations for the next generation got the better of them. One afternoon, however, the kindergarten was closed forever. Three SS trucks had taken the class on an outing from which it would never return.

  Next to be weeded out as ‘useless’ were ageing women. Working in the railway yards in the summer of 1942, Simon Wiesenthal watched helplessly as the SS crammed elderly Jewish women into a freight train – one hundred to the car – and then let it stand for three days in the blazing sun while the women begged for water. Hearing their cries, he could only p
ray that his mother was not among them, but God was on leave and Rosa Wiesenthal was aboard that train.

  ‘My mother was in August 1942 taken by a Ukrainian policeman,’ Simon says, lapsing swiftly into the present tense as immediacy takes hold. ‘She gives him my gold watch and he says OK and goes away. An hour later, he comes back and this time she has nothing to give him, so she is gone. A neighbour told me this.’ Dragged from the ghetto, Rosa Wiesenthal was put aboard a truck that took her and two dozen others to the freight cars waiting in the yards. They all perished in Belzec, a new extermination camp on the road from Lemberg to Lublin. Rosa Wiesenthal was sixty-three.

  Around the same time, Cyla Wiesenthal learned that, back in Buczacz, her mother had been shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman as she was being evicted from her home. ‘She wasn’t moving quick enough,’ says Simon, ‘so he shot her on the steps of her own house.’ In all, the Wiesenthals lost eighty-nine relatives to the Second World War – and it is for them, among millions of others, that Simon stands deputy.

  4

  Simon and the sunflower

  Imprisoned in the Janowskà concentration camp, where brutality and torture reigned, Simon Wiesenthal was often put on work details outside the camp – which should have been a relief, but wasn’t. Marched through the streets of his city, he could read on the faces of passers-by – even, in one encounter, an ex-classmate’s – that he was in a parade of the legion of the dead, with each marcher carrying around his own death certificate from which only the date was missing. A year earlier, in the squalor of the ghetto, where each Jew was allotted two square metres (less than two and a half square yards) of living space, a friend of Simon’s had overheard an old woman’s answer to how God could allow such suffering. She said simply: ‘God is on leave.’