by Alan Levy
Simon’s crusade for the gypsies posed a dilemma for him which he relates quite candidly in his 1988 memoir: when Wiesel won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, gypsy organizations wanted to go to Oslo to stage a demonstration against him. Wiesenthal pleaded with Roman Rose, president of the Central Council of German Gypsies, to call it off because, as a rival who had been considered for the prize, Wiesenthal would have been accused of inciting the protest to spite Wiesel. Out of long friendship and respect for his loyalty, the gypsies acceded.
In 1985, a happenstance of history had the World Jewish Congress holding its annual meeting in the convention centre of Vienna’s Hofburg (at the other end of which palace President Waldheim would take up office a year later) at the very time when Austrian Minister of Defence Friedhelm Frischenschlager was extending a handshake of welcome to returning war criminal Walter Reder, the massacrist of Marzabotto. While the Congress wrestled with whether to pull out of Vienna and controversy swirled through the Hofburg with Chancellor Sinowatz trying to placate WJC President Bronfman, I saw Wiesenthal and Wiesel stalk a stately minuet of snubbing each other around the gefilte fish at a kosher buffet in the grand ballroom. It was not an appetizing spectacle.
No love has been lost between Wiesenthal and Wiesel since then. As late as 1989, Simon would tell me bitterly about Wiesel: ‘That man, how he hates me!’ For the only time I can remember, Simon failed to add his usual disclaimer: ‘But I am not a hater.’
42
A hero at nightfall
One night a week for eight weeks at a time, I used to teach a four-hour journalism class in English at the Vienna campus of Webster University of St Louis. For ‘Feature Writing’ one Wednesday in 1983, the first half was devoted to ‘The Difficult Interview’ and the second half to ‘The Celebrity Interview’. As it turned out, in the second half, from 8 to 10 p.m., we got both.
My celebrity was Simon Wiesenthal, then nearing his seventy-fifth birthday. Not all of my class of sixteen – Americans, Canadians, Nigerians, Arabs, a Venezuelan official of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a German count, and a Greek co-ed – had known that he was still alive, but everyone knew who he was. ‘The man who caught Eichmann,’ several of them said, even before starting their research. ‘The man who won the Oscar playing Laurence Olivier,’ said one of my lesser lights, who never did do her homework.
Arriving during the half-time break, Simon suffered smilingly through my brief introduction before giving the usual twenty-minute talk he makes for groups that know him mostly from the movies. He began in fluent and rhythmic, if accented, English by denying he was either a Jewish James Bond or Don Quixote: ‘I am neither of them and I am nothing in between. I am only a survivor who was four and a half years in several concentration camps and lost, except for my wife, my whole family. My original profession was architect, at which I worked twelve years – two of them in the Soviet Union. I built many houses. I saw those houses destroyed during the war. After I was liberated in Mauthausen, as a living skeleton, the people who liberated me interrogated me and they offered to build me back up and then send me back home. My “home” used to be Lvov, then in Poland, now in the Soviet Union. But I said to them “Thank you, but no, thank you. Poland is for me a cemetery.’”
Instead, he went on, ‘I built the Jewish Documentation Centre in Linz without money, without any detective background, and without any official auspices because I felt we had – we have! – the right of the victim.’
The more he talked, the more he told the story of his life, the less he sounded like a creation of Cervantes or Ian Fleming, but rather an Old Testament prophet walking today’s troubled earth. Wiesenthal told our class:
‘We live in a modern world. We know there is pollution. The air is bad, the water is bad, the skies are dirty. But there is another sort of pollution that people ignore. In many countries, people are living between murderers – and that is the biggest pollution of all, believe me. Half the people in the world – most of the people in this room! – were born after the war and you have not the personal experience; you have only second-hand information. When you hear about millions, you cannot identify with millions.’
Here he told the story of Eichmann saying in Budapest in 1944 that a hundred dead people is a catastrophe, a million a statistic. Wiesenthal went on to say: ‘He was absolutely right. Today you hear on the radio that there was a bus accident in which thirteen people died and this is a catastrophe. Then you read in the newspaper that in the Sahel region of Africa 25,000 people die of hunger and this is too bad, but you don’t feel anything.’
When Wiesenthal had finished, there was a fervent round of applause, and then I threw the floor open to questions. The German count – working in Vienna as a bartender and taking courses to better himself – had read up on Simon’s memoirs and addressed him by title: ‘Diploma-Engineer Wiesenthal, I understand you twice attempted suicide in the concentration camps. Do you still have mental scars from your experience or has time healed the wounds?’
‘This is not an easy question,’ Simon began, and, after telling how he cut his wrists and overdosed on saccharine, he confronted the query’s moral and psychological dimensions:
‘People ask how someone could live with such bad luck. The first two years after the war, I could not sleep because all my thoughts were with people I’d lost. How could I go back to building houses when, without justice, people cannot build homes or families? First we had to rebuild justice – and I was naïve enough to think that it would take only a few hours. And now, if you ask me what I have made of those thirty-eight years, I must tell you that, at most, I have built only a warning – a warning for the criminals of tomorrow who are born today.’
He told how he could have had Franz Stangl killed for 500 dollars without risking all the perils of extradition, but had refused the offer: ‘For me, the trial is a historical lecture with the help of the criminal – even when there is an acquittal because it happened too long ago and far away. For you, who were born after the war, the trial is more important than the sentence. Information is the best defence for future generations from the murderers of tomorrow. If you know from history the danger, then part of the danger is over because it may not take you by surprise as it did your ancestors.’
In the cases of Eichmann and Stangl, he said, ‘no punishment could have been equated with the enormity of their crimes. The important thing is that guilt was established and justice done before the eyes of the world with Eichmann in that glass box.’ But, asked whether it would have been better to let Eichmann live the rest of his life in prison as a warning to the murderers of tomorrow, Wiesenthal replied: ‘Maybe. But the Israelis were the judges. It was their affair.’
It was when the subject shifted to ‘Israeli affairs’ a little later in the evening that the session turned contentious. We arrived there innocently enough by way of Geneva, where Wiesenthal once addressed the inhabitants of an Arab student residence: ‘I get on very well with Arab young people. I told them that only through talking can people find a solution. Only the Syrians refused to talk to me. We had Lebanese, Jordanians, a couple of Arabs from Israel, a dozen Egyptians, and later an Iraqi joined us. I told him that “585 years before Christ, the Jews were going to Babylon and settling in your country, where they lived for more than two and a half thousand years. It was only after the creation of Israel that they had trouble.’” Then, turning to my class, Wiesenthal asked rhetorically: ‘Do you know that the number of Jews expelled from Arab countries is higher than the number of Palestinian refugees?’
In 1979, toward the end of Kurt Waldheim’s tenure as United Nations Secretary General, his home city of Vienna had been designated as the third official UN city (after New York and Geneva). A skyscraper complex was built on the Danube to house the headquarters of several UN organizations, including the International Atomic Energy Organization, the Industrial Development Agency (UNIDO), and the Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees. A number of m
y students either worked at the UN or had parents who did. The next question came from a Syrian girl who had no qualms about speaking to Simon. Rime (pronounced ‘ream’) Allaf was a leggy and very Westernized ‘diplomatic brat’ who grew up in Geneva and New York and whose father, UN Assistant Secretary General Mowaffak Allaf, happened to be the head of the whole UN operation in Vienna. Rime began:
‘You’ve spoken to us tonight about enemies of our freedom, generations of victims, and the defence of future generations. And you’ve said that your conscience forces you to bring the guilty ones to trial. Now I’d like to ask you why you’ve never thought about living in Israel and whether you think the State of Israel is based upon the principles you subscribe to.’
‘Look,’ Wiesenthal replied patiently, ‘if I did my work from Israel, immediately people would dismiss it as Israeli propaganda. My kind of work can only be done independently in such a way that people can’t say that it’s in my country’s interest to accuse someone. This way, my contacts with Israel are that the Israeli police look for witnesses in Israel to the cases I am working on. Besides, I am an Austrian citizen. My daughter and grandchildren, they live in Israel. I knew [Prime Minister Menachem] Begin only fifty-two years. I don’t agree with everything that’s going on in Israel . . .’
‘Do you agree with anything?’ Rime interrupted.
‘No, I agree with some and disagree with others. But the right to criticize openly belongs only to the people who live there because they pay the bills. My daughter and son-in-law, they have the right to open their mouths and say what is good and bad. It’s very easy to sit in a safe country and give advice to people who are living in danger. After the affair in Lebanon last year, I spoke to a group of Italian leftist Jews and when they said what Israel was doing wrong, I told them to go to Israel and make it better. Every Jew can go to Israel.’
That ‘affair in Lebanon last year’ was the Israeli invasion of 1982, and now Wiesenthal was tiptoeing, all too willingly, into hot water: ‘I could take an evening to tell you about the whole big manipulation of news that happened there.’
‘From which side?’ Rime asked softly.
Simon rose to the bait. ‘You know,’ he began, almost paternally, ‘Beirut is like Vienna in one respect. Vienna is a hole in the Iron Curtain. When journalists are trying to find out what is going on in Prague, Budapest, or Belgrade, they don’t go there. They come here to find out what is happening there! Beirut is the same for the Near East. Anything you want to know about Libya, Saudi Arabia, or Abu Dhabi, you can find out better in Beirut.
‘That’s why all the important media have offices there: New York Times, CBS, ABC, that’s where they send their correspondents. The correspondents come and go, but who runs the offices for them? Palestinians! So when war breaks out, the correspondents are immediately on the leash of their offices. And I advise you to study the long list of journalists who were killed in Beirut since 1972. I cannot say that all the people running the offices of the media were members of the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization], Maybe yes, maybe no. But they followed their directions.
‘Through this, in the first days [of the 1982 affair in Lebanon], you were hearing about 600,000 homeless people. But the Israelis were only on the coastal side, where, in the whole territory, there were only 400,000 people, so how can there be 600,000 homeless?’
Simon’s eyes rolled with amusement and there were a few knowing chuckles from the class, but I didn’t find it funny. Sitting in the back row was my Palestinian pupil, Shawkat Hasan. A fortyish film-maker working for UNRWA, he had not seen his home since he was nine. And I had only to look at Shawkat to know that each life made homeless is a tragedy, while the difference between 400,000 and 600,000 is a statistic.
Shawkat sat silent as Simon rambled on. In July 1982, a month after the invasion, Wiesenthal had been in Israel and, in the lobby of a Hilton hotel, met a man from one of the big American TV networks who had just come from Beirut. Simon asked him: ‘Did you buy a souvenir for your wife?’
‘How did you know?!’ the newsman exclaimed. ‘I bought her a bracelet.’
‘And how much did you pay for it?’
‘Oh, 500 Lebanese pounds.’
‘How much did they ask for?’
‘Well, they asked 1200.’
‘Are you sure you made a good buy?’
The newsman shrugged, saying: ‘Maybe I could have bargained them down to 450.’
Simon said to him: ‘You see, with the bracelet for your wife, you made deductions. When they said it was worth 1200, you felt this was not true. But every day you are buying information without making deductions. You supply your millions of audience with statistics that aren’t true. Why don’t you go on the air and apologize, saying: “Excuse me, I was a victim of false information. It was not 600,000 made homeless at the beginning; it was 150,000”?’
Red-faced and still quivering with righteous re-enacted rage at the TV newsman, Simon interrupted Philip Eguaseki from Nigeria when he challenged his assertion that all Beirut bureaus and correspondents were run by Palestinians: ‘Look, you always saw on TV the firing Israeli tank. You saw the target: a house. But I have talked to the crews and now you can go to Beirut and you will hear – not just from Jews, but from other people – how the PLO put all their war machinery – whole installations! – in the houses.’
Philip persisted: ‘Don’t you believe that massacres took place in the refugee camps?’ He was referring to the killings of more than 300 Palestinian men, women, and children in the camps of Sabra and Chatila on the southern edge of West Beirut on 17 September 1982. Although no Israeli troops were directly involved in the killings, they had sealed off the area and permitted Lebanese Christian militiamen to enter the camps and kill Arabs.
Simon said softly: ‘Look, I was one of the first to ask for an inquiry committee into what has happened in Sabra and Chatila. On the other side, when you look at the whole history of the civil war from 1975, you see that massacres are the political language there. Look, according to newspapers, a few days ago, the Druze [Moslems] massacred a village of Christians. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not true, I don’t know. But, in all of the criticism against the Israelis, people forget one small thing – that the Christian Phalangists, not the Israelis, killed those people!’
‘In Sabra and Chatila?’ Rime Allaf asked. ‘But, two nights before then, the Israeli Army had encircled them and. . .’
‘One moment! One moment!’ Simon interjected. ‘I will give you a counter question. I don’t wish to give you a direct question about Syria. . .’
‘Please do!’ Rime interrupted.
‘Because I could ask you what happened in Hama,’ Simon went on, and when Rime said all right, he asked rhetorically: ‘What happened in Hama? Almost 20,000 people were killed.’ (In late 1982, the Syrian Army and ruling Ba’ath Party, using artillery and tanks, had repressed a rebellion in the clandestine Moslem Brotherhood’s citadel of Hama in northern Syria.)
‘Fine!’ said Rime. ‘But we are talking about military dictatorship. In Hama, what happened is that the Syrian government massacred its own people. In Lebanon, we are talking about an invading army coming into another country. It had control of the whole area. OK, you can say the Phalangists did it, you can say they killed. . .’
Now Wiesenthal interrupted her with a hypothetical question about innocent bystanders caught in a shoot-out between cops and the robbers they’re chasing: ‘Who is responsible? The police or the killers?’
‘If there is an invading army in another country . . .’ Rime reiterated, but then she shifted gear. ‘OK, let’s forget about Lebanon. Let’s go back to 1948 in Deir Yassin. That was a massacre, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Wiesenthal conceded. In April 1948, two Jewish terrorist organizations – Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) and the Stern Gang, to which Menachem Begin and his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, once belonged – combined operations to storm the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin an
d killed some 250 inhabitants.
‘Then what do you say about it?’ Rime asked. ‘I understand totally why you are looking for justice. You have every right to do this. But we must also look at other things. You say we should never be as good at killing as the Nazis . . .’
‘You know,’ said Wiesenthal, ‘I have heard about Deir Yassin and I had talks, not only with Begin, but with other people. They say they had warned the people before and asked them to leave before someone would be shot. And these people, they say, ignored the warning.’
‘Would you leave,’ Rime wanted to know, ‘if somebody comes around and says “if you don’t go out by tomorrow, we’re going to shoot you”? We’re talking about a whole town, a little city of 250 people. And I’m talking about principles. I’m not accusing anybody. Everything you’ve said is great. But where are the principles when you look at the other side?’
‘What you forget,’ Wiesenthal said, ‘is that, a few days before, a convoy of Jewish doctors and nurses was massacred on their way to the Jewish hospital in Jerusalem. Fifty-eight people were massacred, unarmed people, without any warning like in Deir Yassin. This was a time of war.’
I could hardly believe my ears. Here were two people I like and admire, both defending death and destruction. Rime, the diplomat’s daughter par excellence, seemed to be saying that Syria has a right to destroy its own people, so long as they’re Syrians! And Simon – that survivor of the camps, chronicler of genocide, conscience of the world, and symbol of justice – sought to justify the unjustifiable by applying collective guilt, if not selective genocide.
I decided that, as with most political arguments, the more we heard, the less we would want to hear. Besides, as journalists, my students had enough material without letting the war between Simon and Rime deteriorate into bickering, so I intervened as gently as I could, saying: ‘I would like, when we can, to move the discussion back to Europe.’
