by Alan Levy
Gorbachev promised to look into the matter and Carlsson wrote to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre: ‘You may rest assured that Raoul Wallenberg’s fate is very alive in my mind and that the Swedish Government will never relent in its effort on his behalf.’
Once Gorbachev had kicked Andrei Gromyko upstairs to the Soviet presidency in 1985, after twenty-eight years as foreign minister, an editorial crusade by the influential New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal targeted Gromyko as the ‘Kremlin’s living link’ to Raoul Wallenberg:
Gromyko [then] a deputy foreign minister, signed that note in 1957 saying that Mr Wallenberg was dead, but he carefully chose words that implied that the finding could be changed. Mr Gromyko now is President of the Soviet Union. He knows.
And Mr Gorbachev knows and can tell the world whether Mr Wallenberg still lives. And if Mr Wallenberg does not, Mr Gorbachev can say in what manner, year, and cell the Swede of the Jews died. It is important for all people to know, particularly Russians.
In 1988, when Gromyko relinquished the presidency to party chief Gorbachev, Abe Rosenthal renewed the campaign by hinting that Gorbachev could gather strength by baring the sins of his predecessors.
In late 1989, a few months after Andrei Gromyko took his secrets to the grave, Wallenberg’s half-sister and half-brother were invited to Moscow by the Soviet Foreign Ministry, whose spokesman, Gennadi I. Gerasimov, apologized to them for ‘a tragic mistake. Your brother was swept up in the maelstrom of repression.’ The KGB gave them a small box of Raoul’s belongings: his Swedish diplomatic passport, some old bills, and a few notebooks. The KGB’s deputy chairman, Vladimir Perezhkov, expressed his personal admiration for Raoul’s bold deeds in Hungary and added that he had even ‘become a hero in this country.’ But the Russians stuck to the story that the hero died in Lubyanka in 1947. Four days later, the KGB produced the card registering Raoul as a prisoner in Moscow on 6 February 1945; it had just been discovered ‘by chance’.
‘We simply don’t believe them,’ said Nina Lagergren. ‘We are convinced our brother is still alive in a prison here.’
She and Guy van Dardel visited the prison hospital at Vladimir, where Per Anger, now chairman of the Raoul Wallenberg Association, told them several witnesses had placed their half-brother in 1980. And they appeared on a popular television talk show in Moscow, where viewers were asked to call in ‘if you have seen anyone you believe is Raoul Wallenberg.’ Fifty callers responded.
And that’s where it stood for more than a decade. Early in the twenty-first century, however, there was a brief flurry of addition and subtraction by official Russian and Swedish panels looking into Wallenberg’s disappearance. In November 2000, Alexander Yakovlev, head of a Russian presidential commission investigating Wallenberg’s fate, announced that he had been executed for espionage in Lubyanka prison in 1947. But on 12 January, 2001, a Swedish–Russian working group issued two different reports. The Russian side went back to his dying of a heart attack in Lubyanka in 1947. The Swedes said that there is no evidence he died.
‘The most interesting possibility is death by execution or by violence,’ admitted Hans Magnusson, a member of the Swedish panel, ‘but we have not been able to find sustainable evidence. Therefore, we cannot exclude that he lived much longer.’
Despite the Kremlin’s official wall around the Wallenberg case, Simon Wiesenthal insists: ‘What is important is to destroy the legend that Wallenberg died in 1947. What we need from the Soviets is the full truth. If he is alive, where is he? If he is not alive, when and where and under what circumstances did he die? In either event, why, after so many interventions, was the man not released?’ He hoped that ‘today or perhaps tomorrow, Gorbachev could come out from the shadow of all his predecessors and shed the light of truth on the matter. He was the first to have absolutely nothing to lose from the truth. For finding out the truth there is no statute of limitations.’
I asked Wiesenthal: ‘Given so many opportunities to return Wallenberg to freedom, why do you think the Russians chose to destroy him?’
Wiesenthal answered slowly: ‘The Soviet Union, like every dictatorship, never recognized a mistake. In all history, no dictatorship ever did. And nothing has really changed from Stalin to a later regime. So long as they stay a dictatorship, even with Gorbachev, there can be no lasting change. Once they make a statement that is false, even when they know it is false, they stick with it. This is the real philosophy of any dictatorship.’
Then, almost as an aside, he added a pearl of wisdom which has eluded not just dictators through the ages, but such presidents of democracies as Richard Nixon and Kurt Waldheim – and sometimes even Wiesenthal himself:
‘Brighter people know better. When I admit a mistake, I can only win.’
After the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 and Gorbachev became a prematurely elder statesman, I asked Simon Wiesenthal how anyone could believe that Raoul Wallenberg is still alive today. If mortality tables were kept for survival in the gulag, wouldn’t the figure for more than forty-five years be as sub-zero as the Siberian temperature? And, to tell the truth, wouldn’t Wiesenthal himself be surprised if Wallenberg were to turn up alive?
‘A Jew should believe in miracles if he wishes to be a realist,’ Simon replied. ‘Whoever doesn’t believe in miracles is not a realist. Look at me! In a situation where you had to fight every minute of every day for the slimmest chance to stay alive, I tried to commit suicide twice – and I survived. Who gave me the chance to survive? The Gestapo! So I believe in miracles. And I make this formula: Raoul Wallenberg is alive so long as the Russians don’t give us believable information about his death.’
PART IV
Josef Mengele
Boy, they sure were big on crematoriums, weren’t they?
–US Vice President George Bush touring Auschwitz, 1987
21
Mengele the dilettante
A British writer once asked Simon Wiesenthal in the early 1980s what mistakes he had made in his life.
Wiesenthal replied that he was not aware of having made any, but, even if he had, he could not discuss them because neo-Nazis would make propaganda out of his admission. On another occasion, when I asked him the same question in 1983, he gave a more mellow answer: ‘I know there are thousands of people waiting for me to make a mistake. Look, we had 3000 cases in thirty-eight years, but we managed only 1100 to bring to justice. Of the 3000, only four people ever sue me. Three lose the case and one is pending.’ A few weeks later, that last action was dropped by the plaintiff.35
The gap between the wise man who says ‘when I admit a mistake, lean only win’ and the Wiesenthal who cannot afford to concede error is an age-old chasm straddled by psychiatrists with maladjusted home lives, lawyers who break the law, accountants who neglect to pay their taxes. Situated somewhere between Practice and Preach, it is filled with hundreds of human foibles which are the stuff that drama and newspapers are made of. It was through this Paradox Canyon of what Britain’s Observer rightly called ‘empty bombast’ by Nazi-hunters ‘hot on his trail’ that Josef Mengele eluded justice for the last thirty-four years of his life and six years beyond it. At the head of this pack of bloodhounds was Simon Wiesenthal, proclaiming quite sincerely that ‘I have a compact with the dead. But if I could get this man, my soul would finally be at peace.’
He didn’t and it isn’t. But Paradox Canyon has many a twist and turn. Though the dead were denied their day in court with the dapper ‘selector’ who doomed thousands of them at Auschwitz and mutilated so many survivors in the name of medicine, and though Wiesenthal, with alarming consistency, followed every wrong trail (and just a handful of right ones) while barking up virtually every wrong tree, his ‘empty bombast’ made Mengele’s last years a living hell on earth and the ‘Angel of Death’ a haunted recluse.
‘When I was in the camps,’ says Simon Wiesenthal, ‘I hardly heard of Eichmann and never of Stangl, but the name of Dr Josef Mengele was known throughout our world, even by inmates
who had never been near Auschwitz: he was a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Munich who had studied Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, but embraced the racist rubbish of Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s philosopher. He was a Doctor of Medicine from the University of Frankfurt36 who sacrificed thousands of children – twins from all over Europe – to painful injections that tried to change the colour of their eyes from brown to blue . . . Mengele was the perfect SS man; he would smile at pretty girls while he sent them to death. In front of the Auschwitz crematorium, he was once heard to say: “Here the Jews enter through the door and leave through the chimney.”’
Slender and impeccably garbed in his black SS officer’s uniform, his boots polished to an unearthly glow, a gold rosette sewn to his lapel, Captain Mengele liked to ride to work on his bicycle. As the most decorated medical officer on the Auschwitz staff, he always wore across his chest the four decorations he’d won on the Russian front. On an occasion when one of his two Iron Crosses fell off, a platoon of prisoners crawled for their lives – scouring the dirt roads connecting the SS officers’ quarters, where he lived, with the Auschwitz camp, where he had gone on administrative business, and Birkenau, where, as chief medical officer of the extermination camp, he worked out of a barracks behind the hospital. Fortunately, the medal was found on the ground.
Pedalling blithely along, this doctor in his early thirties seemed immune to the dirt, dust, and grease of the misery around him – none of which was permitted to smudge his attire – or smoke from the crematoria and gas chambers that were his Polish backdrop. He might be humming or whistling a melody – maybe Mozart, sometimes Wagner, but invariably with perfect pitch, for there was much that was musical about this man who lives on in the annals of infamy as Auschwitz’s ‘Angel of Death’ or ‘Exterminating Angel’ long after his body failed him in the Atlantic waters off Bertioga Beach in Brazil in 1979 and his skull was exhumed and identified in 1985. Even those who saw through his heavenly and earthly disguises when he was lord of their hell were utterly beguiled:
‘He stood before us, the handsome devil who decided life and death . . . He stood there like a charming, dapper dancing master directing a polonaise. Left and right and right and left his hands pointed with casual movements. He radiated an air of lightness and gracefulness, a welcome contrast to the brutal ugliness of the environs; it soothed our frayed nerves and made whatever was happening devoid of all meaning . . . A good actor? A man possessed? A cold automaton? No, a master of his profession, a devil who took pleasure in his work . . . With utter docility, the people went to the right or to the left . . . wherever the master waved them. Sometimes a daughter did not want to be parted from her mother, but the words, “You’ll see each other tomorrow, after all”, would reassure them completely.’
So wrote Grete Salus, a doctor’s widow who was the sole survivor of Auschwitz in her family. She could never forget this younger practitioner’s death-bedside manner, his ‘most persuasive kindness’ to those he was beckoning to extinction.
Trainside manner would be more correct. Prisoners who had been deported to Auschwitz usually met Mengele minutes after their freight trains left the main line and backed into Birkenau’s drab barbed-wire corridor between the men’s and women’s sectors. This was the death camp’s railway depot, where all the promises and lies they had been told were undone as soon as the doors slid open to the club-wielding SS greeting and rough-and-tumble unloading from unventilated freight cars that were, for many, their last homes on earth; sometimes, forty per cent of a transport was dead on arrival. Wrenched from their baggage and soon to be wrenched from each other, the living were lined up in columns of five and slowly marched past a ‘selector’ – in too many cases, the dashing Dr Mengele.
The ‘selection ramp’, where the fates of millions were decided in seconds, was just a low-slung railway platform with a track on one side and two tracks on the other. There he stood, usually with his hands clasped behind his back. His lips were tightly shut, unless he was whistling. (The Blue Danube Waltz and an aria from Tosca were favourites in his repertoire.) Sometimes he spoke. ‘To the right,’ he would say casually to a young woman or a strong man. ‘To the left,’ he would say, with a wink, to a couple of adorable children and their nervous grandmother, for all three of whom his was the last smiling face they would see on earth. Each command would be accompanied by a debonair wave of the appropriate hand. Often he wore elegant white kid gloves, which were never dirty.
Sometimes he would dispatch a child to the left and a mother to the right. ‘Please, sir,’ the mother would plead timidly, ‘I’m the boy’s mother and I’d like to go with him.’ In such cases, where other SS officers would fly into murderous rages, Mengele would simply reply: ‘As you wish. You may both go to the left.’
That day, ‘to the left’ meant immediate death in one of Birkenau’s four chimneys, where, within an hour, mother and son would be smoke and ashes and tiny particles of bone. ‘To the right’ meant life – for a while, at least. For this group, Mengele chose men, women, and teenagers who looked as though they could work hard in Auschwitz’s slave-labour factories and hospitals and on its roads.
For him, ‘selections’ were a game. Sometimes, he changed the rules of the game and, for a few days, ‘left’ was life and ‘right’ meant death. Many healthy mothers, upon arrival, thought they were sparing their sons hard labour when they convinced Mengele to send the lads in the other direction with their sisters and grandmothers; Mengele usually obliged. A woman with whom he worked and who knew the rules once pleaded with him when he dispatched her father to his death. ‘Your father,’ Mengele said cheerfully, ‘is in his seventies. Don’t you think he’s lived long enough?’
He liked cryptic dialogues in which he understood the subtle nuances, but the other person didn’t. ‘Have you ever been on the other side?’ he asked an ailing woman who didn’t yet realize she was ticketed to the gas chamber. ‘What’s it like over there?’
‘I don’t understand your question, sir,’ said the woman.
‘Don’t worry,’ he assured her. ‘You’ll know the answer before long.’
Once, he stood before a dozen Yugoslav peasants who had just arrived at Birkenau. ‘Sing something from Wagner for me,’ he demanded. The Slavs had never heard of Wagner. For that, they died.
At one ‘selection’, a beautiful young girl caught his eye. ‘You look like an educated person,’ he told her. Then he whistled a tune. ‘Do you know what that’s from?’ he asked in a puzzled tone.
‘It’s Wagner,’ she said helpfully. ‘I’m not sure, but I think it’s from Tannhäuser.’
‘Sorry!’ said the genial master of ceremonies. ‘The answer is Lohengrin.’ And for that mistake, she went to the left.
When the first deportations from Hungary delivered a freight car-load of one hundred rabbis – all dressed in black hats and long black satin robes – Mengele formed them in a circle and made them dance. Cracking a whip, he choreographed them faster and faster and made them lift their heads up to the sky and their Lord who was on leave. Then, for entertainment’s sake, he commanded them to sing – and, without skipping a beat, humiliation turned to pride as the rabbis chanted the most sublime melody in the Jewish liturgy: Kol Nidre, an anguished, plaintive prayer which ushers in the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and seems to echo the Jews’ long history of torture, flogging, flaying, hanging, rending, burning, and boiling. With that, the party was over for Mengele, as the hundred rabbis straightened their backs, broke their circle, and marched off defiantly to the gas chamber, chanting the Jewish death-bed (and daily) prayer: ‘Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad.’ (‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’)
Of the millions he met in the eternal chill before the chimneys of Birkenau, Dr Mengele reserved a special welcome for those who had not been created ‘in God’s image’, for they were laboratory animals for his diabolical pseudo-scientific ‘experiments’. The author of Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Lan
d, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, remembers how ‘he once brought a woman to our area who had two noses. Another time he brought a girl of about ten years of age who had the wool of a sheep on her head instead of hair. On another occasion, he brought a woman who had donkey ears.’ And, of course, he adored midgets and dwarfs. He rubbed his hands with glee when one transport delivered a whole family of midgets from a circus in Budapest. He was doubly delighted to discover that they had brought their own miniature furniture with them. Personally assigned by him to private quarters, the midgets primped and powdered themselves for his house call. ‘How beautiful he is! How kind!’ they exclaimed. ‘How lucky we are that he became our protector! How good of him to ask if we have everything we need!’ When he arrived, the tiny matriarch fell at his feet, hugged his shiny boot, and started to kiss it. ‘You are so kind, so gorgeous. God should reward you,’ she murmured. With a flick of his foot, Mengele shook her off his boot and sent her sprawling. ‘Now tell me how you lived with your midget,’ he commanded. ‘Speak!’ Recovering herself, the woman began to tell how her husband was a loving father, a hard worker, a good provider. ‘Don’t tell me about that!’ Mengele interrupted, frothing at the mouth. ‘Only how you slept with him.’
Most of the midgets died slow, but relatively luxurious, deaths as Mengele bled them every few days to ascertain the secrets of their heredity in his ‘scientific laboratories’. On blood-letting days, he gave them double rations of bread to reward them for their contribution to German research – and some of the more conscientious midgets even volunteered to be bled at more frequent intervals just to earn extra bread to feed their families.
