Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  Yes, said Simon, for a price: his wife’s freedom.

  Cyla Müller Wiesenthal was blonde and could pass for a Pole. The underground smuggled her out of the yards one night and gave her the identity of ‘Irene Kowalska’ with which she took a morning train to Warsaw and settled into an apartment that was waiting for her at 5 Topiel Street. Cyla found herself sharing the flat with the wife of the Polish poet Jerzy Lec, but Mrs Lec was also using a pseudonym, so neither woman knew the other’s identity – or that the other was Jewish, too.

  Still quite sure he wouldn’t survive the war, Simon rejoiced that his wife might. Soon, virtually all Jewish women in ghetto and camp were liquidated, so he knew he had made the right move for Cyla. Now he had to look after himself. In late September 1943, when word came down that Jewish prisoners who lived at the railway works would soon be spending their nights at Janowskà, Wiesenthal read between the lines and concluded it would be fatal for him to go back there. Even Kohlrautz kept looking at him and asking: ‘Simon, what are you waiting for?’

  Kohlrautz often sent Simon, guarded by a Ukrainian policeman, into town to buy art supplies and run other errands for him. On Saturday, 2 October 1943, Wiesenthal and Arthur Scheiman, a former circus director, requested passes to go shopping before the stores closed. Kohlrautz was glad to oblige. While the German boss went looking for a particularly stupid Ukrainian to accompany them, Wiesenthal and Scheiman fished the two pistols out of Kohlrautz’s drawer. He came back with a real prize: a Ukrainian who was new to Lemberg and didn’t know the city. With a wink, a wave, and a sly ‘auf Wiedersehen!’ (‘See you again!’), Kohlrautz sent them off to town.

  They visited a stationery store that had front and back entrances. They told their guard to wait for them at the cashier’s desk near the front. Knowing that nobody could leave without paying, he assented. Then they left by the back door.

  A Polish friend from the underground sheltered them in his apartment for a couple of days. Then Scheiman rejoined his wife, a Ukrainian seamstress, who hid him in her clothes closet by day when her customers came for fittings. The partisans moved Simon to a nearby village, Kulparkow, where the parents of a Polish girl who worked at the railway yards hid him in the attic of their house. From this base, he helped the partisans build bunkers and lines of fortification. ‘I was not so much a strategic expert as a technical expert,’ he recalls, telling how he worked closely with the partisans in the region.

  A little nomenclature is necessary here. By late 1943, two main groups of Poles-in-exile were already competing for control of postwar Poland: Stalin had allowed his Polish prisoners of war – taken by the Red Army between 1939 and 1941, when Russia and Germany were allies – to form a military corps under General Wladyslaw Anders which fought with distinction against the Germans. But the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile in London had broken relations earlier in 1943 over a German revelation which, for once, was all too true: in a forest near the Polish village of Katyn, the Germans had found the mass grave of some 4250 Polish officers massacred by the Russians in 1939.13 In eastern Poland almost five years later, there were two main underground groups fighting the Germans: The Polish National Resistance Movement, or Home Army (Armja Krajowa, known by its initials A.K.), supported from and by England, and more nationalistic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Soviet than A.L., the People’s Army, which was supported by the Russians. Nevertheless, A.K. and A.L. didn’t fight each other. But, says Wiesenthal, ‘there were also partisan groups which were friendly with the Germans. One was UPA, the Ukrainian Partisan Army. It had support from the German Army to fight other partisans. It was anti-Soviet and it received its equipment from the Germans.’

  Wiesenthal, whose rescuers were from the pro-Soviet A.L. partisans, says that ‘most of our battles were against UPA. But there were cases when our group was bombarded by Soviet planes, since the circumstances in this area were such that we were concentrated there together with four or five other partisan groups. There was such confusion by January of 1944 that no one knew who was with who and who was fighting who. Whoever stuck his head out of the forest got shot at.’

  While Simon was in hiding with the A.L. partisans in the area between Lemberg and Tarnopol,14 a Hungarian division and the Ukrainian SS Division ‘Galicia’ and a Ukrainian auxiliary police division were combing the woods for partisans. As in Vietnam years later and perhaps in all wars throughout history, the body-counts to headquarters often seemed more important than the actual results. ‘Quite often,’ Simon recalls, ‘a group from the Field Police, the Ukrainian auxiliary police, would come up to the edge of the forest. Then fifty men would go in about a hundred metres [110 yards], shoot off a few rounds – and then we would receive a report that about a hundred partisans had been killed and ten bunkers had been discovered.’

  Toward the end of 1943, the Germans liquidated much of the Janowskà concentration camp. Most of the prisoners were shot, but others fled. As the Gestapo scoured the countryside for them, Simon had to leave his attic in Kulparkow and join the A.L. partisans, who didn’t mind having Jews in their ranks if they could help. Two Jews, Tanenbaum and Mogely, were already there – until early 1944, when they were ‘sent to Biasky, a village nearby,’ Simon explains, ‘to see a friendly farmer who kept a supply of food [and] to deliver money. We had to pay in dollars.’

  The idea of dollars circulating in the backwoods of Nazi-occupied Poland in 1944 astounds his listener, but Simon ploughs on:

  ‘The Russian partisans had dollars, as a rule: one-hundred-dollar bills. We buried at least seventy or eighty thousand dollars. In any case, our Russian liaison man who was with us was always well supplied with dollars. Even if one had to pay only twenty dollars, a hundred would be paid, with no change in return. The Polish zloty was worthless: just like now. But Mogely and Tanenbaum were caught and we found them two days later with their eyes gouged out and their tongues cut off, and one of them appeared to have had his genitals worked over with a wire.’

  Together with the farmer with whom they traded, they had been caught by the Secret Field Police or Ukrainian auxiliaries. ‘As the farmer’s widow told us later on,’ Simon remembers, ‘the Secret Field Police first brought her husband before a field court and then to Lemberg, where he was shot dead.’

  This was a more merciful death than Mogely’s and Tanenbaum’s or those of three hostages Simon says ‘a neighbouring group of us once liberated’ from German Army capture: ‘The three persons had been forced into a very little room. For seventy-two hours, they did not get anything to eat. This room was in a farm where sausage was being smoked and dried. The three people were in this room while the stove was constantly heated, so that there was a temperature of over fifty degrees Celsius [122° F] in this room. We found these three men in a condition so that they were like boiled. One of them lived for another five days. The other two were unconscious and never came out of it. A doctor gave the living person several injections and treated him with water, but it was no use.’

  In February of 1944, Wiesenthal goes on, ‘our group was encircled. It was hopeless to stay there, for the Germans were approaching from all sides. During one night, we decided to split up into as many parts as possible by dividing into groups . . . Four of us made our way through and arrived together in Lemberg. We entered the apartment of a Pole, pistols in hand, but he wasn’t in. So we helped ourselves to his civilian clothes there, and left in pairs, forty metres [44 yards] apart.’

  The only partisan address they had in Lemberg was that of the liaison man for A.K. the pro-British, but anti-Semitic, underground group: ‘A.K. did accept Jews in Lemberg all the same because the pressure of the Germans was much stronger there than in any other territory. So the A.K. liaison man did offer an apartment to the four of us belonging to friends who were in the field.’ His Gentile comrades accepted the invitation, but Simon, feeling uncomfortable about his hosts, went looking for his original escape partner, the circus director Scheiman.

  Scheiman was still crou
ching in the closet of his wife, the Ukrainian seamstress. He invited Simon to join him. ‘The next eight days were almost as bad as the concentration camp,’ says Wiesenthal. ‘Scheiman and I spent our days squatting on low stools in the left-hand half of the closet. The other half, filled with clothes, was kept open. Twice, the police came looking for Scheiman, but when they saw the open closet, they went away again. The air was suffocating in there and we were afraid to cough. A few feet away, Mrs Scheiman’s Gentile customers were dressing and undressing for their fittings. It was a totally risky situation.’

  Mrs Scheiman wasn’t happy with the situation either, so the two men swallowed their pride and took sanctuary in the A.K. apartment, where Simon’s partisan friends had hollowed out a ‘grave’ – big enough for a pair of people to recline – in the sand beneath the ground floorboards. The two Jewish fugitives spent most of their time above the earth, but, whenever there was a search, they would climb into their grave and the Poles would cover them with three boards and a heavy table. Eventually, Scheiman (who survived the war) couldn’t take this ‘life’ and returned to his wife’s closet. Simon stayed on – savouring the extra elbow room.

  In early June 1944, during a drinking bout in a neighbouring house, a chief inspector of the German railways was beaten and robbed by his Polish companions. A house-to-house police search was ordered. Simon reburied himself several times and was in his makeshift coffin on Tuesday, 13 June 1944, when more than eight months of cramped and perilous ‘freedom’ came to an end. As the Gestapo entered the courtyard of the house, the Polish partisans fled, leaving Wiesenthal trapped beneath the earth ‘in a position where I couldn’t even make use of my weapon.’

  A minute later, he heard heavy boots tramping above. Two Polish detectives – who knew exactly where to look – slid back the table, took away the boards, and pounced upon him. They seized his pistol and a diary Simon had been keeping while hiding. Simon won’t say whether he thinks one of the A.K. partisans betrayed him. He was bundled into a car and slapped around before being delivered to the Germans.

  Possession of a pistol was grounds for immediate execution. Fortunately, the two Polish detectives didn’t turn the weapon in to the Gestapo, but took it for themselves to sell on the black market. They did, however, deliver Wiesenthal and his diary to the Germans – which proved to be a stroke ofluck, too. In the book, he’d recorded not just the doings of SS men in Janowskà – from Dyga and Blum (in charge of the Askaris) up the ladder to Rokita, Gebauer, and Wilhaus – but also, in recent weeks, maps and diagrams (coded so that only he could explain them) of partisan emplacements to help the advancing Red Army make contact with their allies. ‘I owe it specially to these circumstances that I was not killed right away, as so many other Jews,’ he says, ‘for these records seemed to be very valuable partisan documents.’

  Simon was sent to what was left of Janowskà: a penal colony of tailors, shoemakers, plumbers, gravediggers, body-burners, and other craftsmen still needed by the SS for a while. ‘The Pipe’ was still there, too, and, while the Gestapo studied his diary, Wiesenthal readied himself for the inevitable second and final trip through ‘The Pipe’.

  Two nights later, a truck with two Gestapo agents came for Wiesenthal. When he saw that one of them was Master Sergeant Oskar Waltke, chief of the Jewish affairs section in Lemberg, Wiesenthal’s heart sank, for this was a man whose misdeeds (mentioned by Wiesenthal in his captured diary) had made him the most feared man in Galicia. Waltke has been described by Wiesenthal as ‘a cold, mechanical sadist’, a heavy-set man with reddish blond hair and steely grey eyes who called his prisoners his ‘children’ and knew how to savour and prolong their agonies. ‘Waltke’s speciality’, says Wiesenthal, was ‘to make Jews with false Polish papers admit they were Jews. He tortured his victims until they confessed and then he sent them to be shot. He also tortured many Gentiles until they admitted to being Jews just to get it over with.’

  When Waltke saw Simon, he smiled and beckoned him into the truck, saying ‘Get in, my child’, in such a gloating manner that Wiesenthal was sure Waltke had read every word of his diary. ‘I knew I was finished. The only question was how he would finish me. I didn’t want to know the answer.’

  As he climbed aboard, Wiesenthal took out a small razor blade he’d concealed in his cuff. With two swift strokes, he cut both wrists. ‘With my right hand, I managed well. With my left hand, which I had cut open, not so well,’ he says, displaying the scars.

  On the truck, he lost consciousness and was driven directly to the Gestapo prison hospital, where he shared a medical cell with two deserters: a German SS man and a Ukrainian. Later, he learned he was the first Jew ever admitted to this hospital. The doctor told him he had lost two thousand grammes of blood. Waltke had left orders to feed Wiesenthal a special diet of hearty soups, liver, and vegetables so he could interrogate him sooner.

  This meant Waltke hadn’t been able to decipher the tactical parts of the diary. Rather than risk betraying the partisans who’d sheltered him, Wiesenthal opted again for suicide:

  ‘When I went to the doctor for him to change my bandages, I stole a jar of pills. They were very little, so I thought I had better take them all – four or five hundred of them – to finish myself off.

  ‘So I waited until midnight and got them all down me. And do you know what they were?’ he asks with a twinkle. ‘Five hundred tablets of saccharin!’

  While Wiesenthal was recovering from this minor stomach upset, Waltke paid him a visit and told him: ‘That wasn’t necessary, child. We aren’t monsters. Now get well soon so you and I can have a long talk.’

  Wiesenthal tried suicide one last time. He threw his belt over a bar of the high cell window. When he climbed up on the toilet seat to put the belt around his neck, however, his bandaged wrists went numb and his weakened system made him dizzy. ‘My veins hadn’t grown together yet,’ he said later, ‘so I was bound to fall.’ He pitched forward in a dead faint which awoke his cellmates, who called the guards. Tied to his bunk, Wiesenthal decided to let Waltke do the work that he’d botched thrice. ‘What will come will come,’ he told himself, ‘but no more suicide. Let them kill me.’

  Soon, Waltke paid him another visit and said: ‘You are looking well, my child. In two days, we will have our first talk.’

  Waltke would be hard pressed to find time for their talk. The days were numbered, for, late in 1942 and early in 1943, the Red Army had taken the offensive after encircling and capturing or killing the Germans trying to cross the Volga at Stalingrad. By mid-July of 1944, the Red Army was within twelve miles of Lemberg. During the next two nights, Wiesenthal’s troubled sleep was jarred by the din of planes, sirens, and heavy artillery, but all these sounds were like music to him, even though he suspected that they might hasten his end.

  At dawn on the morning of Wiesenthal’s date with Waltke – Tuesday, 18 July 1944 – all the cell doors of the Gestapo prison opened and the inmates filed into the courtyard, where Waltke and an SS officer were selecting prisoners ‘for further disposition’. On the left side stood a group of Jewish slave labourers who had serviced the prison and were now ticketed for liquidation at Janowskà. Their last job had been to dig a mass grave – not for themselves, but for those who were standing on the right and would not leave the courtyard alive: Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and German deserters.

  When Wiesenthal’s name was called, Waltke said, ‘That’s the one I told you about’, and, with just a perfunctory flicker of interest, the SS officer sent Simon to the right: the Gentile side.

  ‘I looked at the others like some people on an airplane look at their fellow passengers,’ Wiesenthal remembers. ‘If the plane should crash, I am thinking, these will be my companions in death. Across the courtyard, I see the group of Jews and wish I could be buried with them, not with Gentiles and Nazis. But how to get there? In that moment, there is a roar in the sky above us and an explosion shakes the courtyard. From Sapiehy Street, a cloud of fire and smoke shoots up in
the air. The files on the table in front of Waltke and the of officer are scattered all over. Quickly, in the confusion, I run across the courtyard and join my own people. After the air raid, there is an air-raid warning; a car with sirens drives around for this purpose. But there is no air raid and, an hour later, after the all-clear sounds, two SS men put us on a truck and bring us back to the Janowskà concentration camp for the last time in my life.’

  The truckload of Jews was greeted by the new camp commandant who had succeeded Wilhaus. Friedrich Warzok was a chunky, ruddy, cold-eyed killer Wiesenthal credits with the deaths of 70,000 Jews in his various posts. Warzok’s first question was: ‘Who from you was here before?’

  Ready – almost eager! – to die, only Wiesenthal stepped forward.

  ‘Very good!’ said Warzok. ‘We like to welcome back old guests – lost sheep who have come back to their flock. When were you here last?’

  ‘Last summer,’ Wiesenthal replied.

  ‘And what should we do with you?’

  ‘Please, shoot me,’ Wiesenthal said with resignation.

  ‘No!’ said Warzok decisively. ‘A Jew should never die when he wishes, only when we wish.’

  6

  A Polish odyssey 1944

  The last time Simon Wiesenthal saw Lemberg – on Wednesday, 19 July 1944 – he and thirty-three other survivors of Janowskà were marched through the city, under heavy Red Army artillery fire, to the railway yards where he and Cyla had worked before their escapes and where his mother and thousands of other ageing women had stood suffering for three days without water in crammed freight cars beneath blazing summer sun not quite two years earlier while awaiting deportation to the fires of Belzec.