by Alan Levy
Put aboard a freight car, Simon and his fellow hostages worried whether they were going to be gassed – until SS man Blum, who’d been in charge of the Askaris, added two more passengers: his dog and, in a cage, his canary. ‘That was the best news,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘because the SS men all loved their pets and would never be so unhuman as to gas them. Blum said we’d all be shot if anything happened to his bird or his dog. So we took extra special care of them.’
They reached the city of Przemysl, 125 miles west of Lemberg, the next morning and were transported to the town of Dobromil, where the railroad tracks gave out. Then they were marched along the main road west, already clogged with civilians fleeing the Russians. The 200 SS men guarding the thirty-four Jewish slave labourers were running for their lives, too, and when a horse-drawn convoy of Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans from Poland) overtook the group, Warzok – Janowskà’s runaway commandant – halted them and commandeered thirty of their forty wagons.
With each wagon piloted by a Jew and six or seven SS men riding shotgun to ‘guard’ him, this cowardly caravan caught up near the last bridge across the Raver San with a German Army column retreating from the Red Army, which was coming closer and closer. If the soldiers with their heavy equipment crossed the bridge first, the Russians might well catch up with ‘SS Construction Staff Venus’, as Warzok called his bootleg work force.
Though only a captain – but an SS captain! – Warzok pulled rank and a weapon on the Army major commanding the retreating unit. With his pistol held to the major’s head and other SS men covering the column with submachine-guns, Warzok ordered his wagons to cross the bridge first and then took two Army engineers across with him while keeping the major and his officers covered with a submachine-gun. The bridge had already been planted with dynamite for eventual destruction, but Warzok had the engineers do it now – leaving their unit and its furious major to be captured by the Red Army while Construction Staff Venus went unscathed and unreported.
Near the Polish city of Grybow, Warzok’s crew of captors and captives pitched camp in the middle of a large field. Wiesenthal painted a sign proclaiming it headquarters of SS BAUSTAB VENUS and, for more than a month, the war and the world passed them by without asking any questions.
One September day, however, an SS Rottenführer (corporal) named Merz asked Wiesenthal a question of his own. Merz, whom Wiesenthal considered a relatively decent Rottenführer, had gone foraging for food and taken Simon along because he spoke Polish. Now, toting two sacks of potatoes, they relaxed beside a babbling brook at the edge of a rustling forest. The weather in Eastern Europe is at its best in September and, stretched out on his back, Merz studied the hazy sky above and let his mind wander.
‘Suppose an eagle took you to America, Wiesenthal,’ he asked. ‘What would you tell them there?’
Fearing a trap, Wiesenthal said nothing. But Merz persisted: ‘Don’t be afraid. You can talk frankly.’
Wiesenthal evaded the question: ‘Herr Rottenführer, how could I get to America? I might as well try to go to the moon.’
Rottenführer Merz wouldn’t let Simon off the hook: ‘Just imagine, Wiesenthal, that you’re arriving in New York and the people ask you, “How was it in those German concentration camps? What did they do to you?’”
Taking his life into his mouth, Wiesenthal replied haltingly: ‘I believe – I believe I would tell the people the truth, Herr Rottenführer.’
Merz didn’t shoot him. He simply said: ‘You would tell the truth to the people in America. That’s right. And do you know what would happen, Wiesenthal? They wouldn’t believe you.’
With these words, Merz reinforced Wiesenthal’s will to live – and prove him wrong.
Merz Schmerz was what Wiesenthal would call the pain caused by daily fulfilment of the cynical but wise Rottenführer’s prophecy. Still, as the war neared its inevitable end – painfully, usually fatally, slowly for those caught in the camps – the need to bear witness gave thousands of the doomed, many of them more than half dead already, a new grip on survival: a reason for enduring. At Treblinka, would-be suicides who wrapped ropes around their necks were often talked down from their improvised nooses by other Jews who convinced them their testimony would be needed.
As the Germans stepped up their programme of deportation and gassing, hundreds of Jews launched their own programmes of writing and recording. Mordecai Tenenbaum, a Jewish resistance leader in Vilna and later in Bialystok, kept a journal with names and dates and details throughout his adventures and told his fiancée, Tamara Sznajderman, a courier for the Jewish Fighting Organization, to ‘live, live at any price so you can tell the story; you are so good at that.’ After she was killed in combat in the Warsaw Ghetto in early 1943, a few months before he led an uprising in which he perished in Bialystok, Tenenbaum buried his journal in the ground for posterity to unearth. Its opening words were: ‘Greetings, unknown seeker who discovers these pages.’
Way back in 1933 in Warsaw, a far-sighted young Jewish historian named Emanuel Ringelblum had started collecting documents and taking notes on Hitler’s earliest decrees in neighbouring Germany with an eye to how they might affect Polish Judaism and inspire ‘Jewish countermeasures’. Even before the Jews were arbitrarily moved by the German occupiers into what became the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, Ringelblum was noting such everyday details as ‘Dr Cooperman was shot for being out after eight o’clock. He had a pass’, and a ban on the posting of obituary notices. Later, Ringelblum would record the gallows humour of the ghetto: ‘If the Germans win the war, twenty-five per cent of the Jews will be dead by then. If the British win, seventy-five per cent will be dead – because the English will take so long.’
Deported in early 1943 to a labour camp, Ringelblum was smuggled out and back to Warsaw by the Jewish resistance because his mission was so vital. In hiding, he continued his chronicles, even though he was on a list of nineteen key resistance figures whom the London-based Polish government-in-exile had agreed to bring out to freedom. By the time action was possible, sixteen were dead. Ringelblum and the other two refused to be rescued ‘because we must fulfil our duty to society.’ Arrested again that March with thirty-seven other Jews hiding in a bunker, Ringelblum was tortured by the Gestapo and then executed with his wife and son a few weeks before the twenty-eight-day Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 1943: the war’s most heroic armed conflict and a resounding rebuttal to Jewish submission to genocide.
When the ghetto was liquidated, 56,000 of its 60,000 Jews were dead; most of the rest were deported to the death camps. But Ringel-blum’s notes and other archives (including the first eye-witness account of exterminations at Treblinka)) were found in milk cans and tin boxes dug up in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1946 and 1950. In the ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1945 and 1962, searchers in the bone-riddled earth near where the crematoria once burned day and night unearthed five manuscripts of workers in the Sonderkommando whose job was to destroy the remains of the gassed; late in 1980, a sixth – written in Greek and preserved in a buried Thermos – was discovered by Polish schoolchildren planting a tree. All these manuscripts were posthumous – but their authors’ words lived to tell the truth.
The posthumous ‘diary of Salomon Tauber’ – a Kapo (Jewish policeman) in the ghetto of Riga, Latvia, who packs his wife into a gassing van – triggers the plot of a living work: Frederick Forsyth’s 1972 novel, The Odessa File. There is not a word of invention in this fictional ‘diary’, for it is drawn from depositions in Simon Wiesenthal’s office.
Thus, Wiesenthal himself looks upon his conversation with Rottenfiihrer Merz and the spiritual pain that followed as a moment of truth that opened unto him his future as an archangel of revelation and retribution. He uses it without any comment or embellishment as a closing postscript to his 1967 memoir, The Murderers Among Us. Asked about it now, he recalls that only after he left Lemberg could he consider any horizon wider than his wife’s safety somewhere in Warsaw and his own survival from day to day, or dawn
to dusk. But his Polish odyssey – in the custody of 200 SS killers who needed him and some thirty other Jews to keep themselves alive – opened his eyes to the reality that Germany was actually about to lose the war and his captors were looking for ways to melt into the mass of German society which had embraced Hitler without committing the crimes he’d entrusted to the SS. To Wiesenthal, even while hauling potatoes with no end in sight except extinction, the prospect of their postwar assimilation was intolerable.
‘I learned later,’ he says, ‘that ninety-five per cent of the real criminals survived the war through tactics like Warzok’s. But I could see even then that the real soldiers on both sides were fighting and dying – and against them the odds were much higher. And for us, the Jews in German or Ukrainian hands, we would be lucky if five per cent survived. A soldier is not a killer. He fights with the risk he can kill or be killed. And this risk was too high for SS killers like Warzok and Dyga and Blum. Helpless people in a camp or a ghetto can be killed without any risk – without any risk!’ Unable to ride on the wings of Merz’s mythical eagle or a magic carpet that would bear him to America to tell the truth about the camps to an unbelieving, uncaring world, Prisoner Number 127371 began at potato level to dig for data and descriptions, recorded at first only in a retentive mind, which would document the destruction of a people at the hands of the Nazis and bring more than a thousand perpetrators to some semblance of justice.
As the Russians neared Grybow, SS Construction Staff Venus pulled up stakes and moved west again, stealing food as it went. Drawing near the German border, Commandant Warzok knew he would have to present his superiors with a more rational military profile than 200 SS men guarding fewer than three dozen Jews. Thus, in Chelmiec, his SS men surrounded a church during mass and kidnapped all the worshippers – men, women, and children – to work for Venus.
Near Neu Sandez (now Nowy Sacz), Warzok summoned Wiesenthal’s engineering skills to survey terrain for building anti-tank barricades along a steep, narrow dirt road which ended atop a lonely hill. ‘Herr Kommandant,’ Wiesenthal pointed out respectfully, ‘this road leads nowhere. No tank would ever come here.’
Slapping his holster, Warzok barked: ‘Did I ask for your military opinion?’ Wiesenthal recognized that Warzok was merely making work to keep out of a war that was already lost.
‘For a while,’ Wiesenthal recalls, ‘we built defences against tanks that would never come. Then the Russians came closer, so we moved again, this time to the Plaszow concentration camp just outside the city of Cracow, and there Dyga and another SS man took most of the Jews into the nearby woods and shot them’ after the camp authorities had performed a perfunctory ‘selection’ of which ones they would take.
A German general had discovered the Venus hoax, dissolved the ‘construction unit’, and shipped Warzok and his SS men back to the front. ‘Warzok is still around somewhere,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘and I hope I’ll find him before the biological solution catches up with us both.’
Some of Warzok’s Polish captives were executed, too, but the rest were sent home to Chelmiec while a handful of able-bodied Jews was turned over to what Wiesenthal still calls ‘the terrors of Plaszow’, a labour camp where the hardier survivors of Cracow’s ancient ghetto had been moved in late 1942; the others were shipped directly to the death camps.
Licensed architect Simon Wiesenthal did well to lose himself among the faceless slave labour at Plaszow. He survived there until late 1944, when the Red Army neared and the camp was liquidated. To cover their tracks, the Nazis had the inmates dig up mass graves and burn the bodies.
At the end of 1944, Plaszow’s survivors were ‘relocated’. Women and children went to Auschwitz, not quite forty miles away, and were rarely heard from again. Able-bodied men, still including Wiesenthal, were marched to Gross Rosen, a vast quarry near Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) in Lower Silesia. There, the German Earth and State Works, an SS contractor, worked its Jews to death instead of wasting bullets or gas on executing or exterminating them.
In Gross Rosen, they were joined by prisoners taken in the latest Warsaw uprising. Sixteen months after the ghetto and its heroes had been destroyed in four weeks of April 1943, a nine-week non-Jewish Warsaw uprising of 1944 had begun in August when the Red Army had appeared – briefly – on the eastern outskirts of the capital. While the Russians never even attempted to liberate Warsaw until the following year, the Poles had persisted and the SS had defended the city to the death: the death of more than 200,000 civilians and 15,000 Polish underground fighters as well as 10,000 Germans (another 7000 Germans vanished from Warsaw during the battle). Augmented by brigades of Russian deserters and German convicts, the SS brought its own brand of brutality to desperate street fighting which gave Poland’s Gentiles a harsh taste of what the Jews had been experiencing and what awaited them in the next round of the Final Solution. As food, medicine, and, finally, water gave out, disease spread and virtually no children survived. Thousands of Poles were shot in cold blood and much of the city was razed, for Hitler had promised his foes naught but scorched earth to conquer.
Worried about his wife, Cyla, who had been planted by the Polish underground at Topiel Street number 5 in Gentile Warsaw as ‘Irene Kowalska’, Wiesenthal asked the Warsaw survivors whether anybody was from Topiel Street. One of the men said he’d lived at number 7. Without hinting he was married to her, Wiesenthal asked him if he knew Irena Kowalska.
‘The blonde woman? Yes, I remember her well,’ he replied – adding, however, that she was no more. ‘My friend, no one in Topiel Street survived. The Germans surrounded one house after another with flame-throwers and afterwards blew up what was left of the houses. There is no hope, believe me. Topiel Street is one big mass grave.’
Remembering that moment of ‘truth’, Simon Wiesenthal says now: ‘That night, I went to sleep a widower.’ Cyla Wiesenthal had shared a similar experience during the uprising; a Polish underground courier from Lemberg had ‘informed’ Irena Kowalska that ‘Wiesenthal was arrested by Gestapo man Waltke (which was true), cut his wrists (also true), and is dead.’
7
The last liberation 1945
Looking back on early 1945, Simon Wiesenthal says: ‘It was a stinking time then and it is a stinking time for me to investigate now. It was a time when Nazi criminals became Allied helpers because they wanted to save their own lives. Everybody has his pet Jew, his own character witness who could testify in good faith that this killer or that one had spared his life. Only the Eichmann forces, which were scattering, were still one hundred fifty per cent Nazi; all the other Nazis were looking for a way out or at least a foot in the gate of the other camp.’
It was worse than a stinking time for Wiesenthal: a sinking time when, as he puts it, ‘my way of life was twelve hundred miles of concentration camps’ and there were a million ways of death, starting with starvation, disease, decay, fever, frost, incineration, sadism, and summary execution. As the Red Army neared Gross Rosen at the beginning of 1945, the inmates – still heavily guarded – were dispatched on death marches in different directions. Though the war was lost, the Germans would still decide when and where their Jews would die. Those who faltered or fell were shot on the spot.
Wiesenthal’s way was across Silesia to Chemnitz (later Karl-Marx-Stadt in East Germany) . . . through frozen fields and icy woods to Weimar, where democracy had bloomed briefly after Germany lost the First World War . . . and then by cattle car to Buchenwald. ‘The man in charge was one of the nastiest guys I have ever met,’ Wiesenthal recalls. ‘Not only did he call us names I’d not yet heard, but he complained about undercrowding when we were loaded one hundred to a freight car, so they had to bring the number up to a hundred forty-five. The soldiers guarding us didn’t let us fetch water or make water at the railway stations. At the station in Leipzig, some civilians tried to give us some bread, but the soldiers drove them away with their rifle butts. There were about forty dead in each railroad car when we reached Buchenwald.’<
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Buchenwald was perhaps the worst of all the concentration camps within Germany. In the last months of the war, 56,549 prisoners perished there, and it is no accident that the definitive book on the mechanism of the concentration camps, The Theory and Practice of Hell, was written by a survivor of six years in Buchenwald, Eugen Kogon (1903–87), a German writer and editor. It was at Buchenwald that die commandant, Karl Koch, made himself a millionaire through private exploitation of slave labour while his wife, Ilse, ‘The Bitch of Buchenwald’, had her lampshades made from the skins of murdered inmates.15 When Buchenwald was finally liberated in April 1945, most of its Jews had been killed or evacuated elsewhere, but one of them, eight-year-old Israel Lau, was pulled alive from a pile of corpses by an American Army rabbi, who burst into tears as he asked him in Yiddish: ‘How old are you?’
‘Older than you,’ the boy replied.
The rabbi had to laugh, but the child told him: ‘Look, you cry and laugh like a little boy, but I haven’t laughed for years and I don’t even cry any more. So tell me: who is older?’
Wiesenthal hadn’t lingered long in Buchenwald. In early February 1945, he and some 3000 other prisoners had been loaded on to open trucks, 140 to a truck. Their destination was unknown to them – and, it sometimes seemed, to their drivers, who kept them standing on the trucks for a day before departing south and eastward once again. During the six-day trip, there was no food or water.
‘The dead stood quietly among the living,’ Wiesenthal recalls. ‘We would throw them out of the trucks, but when the civilians living along the route protested, the SS men warned us we’d be shot if we threw more bodies out along the highway. So we stuck the stiff bodies on the floor of the truck, like wooden boards, and sat on our dead comrades.’
