by Alan Levy
William Rush, every inch the image of the all-American boy, had his hand up, so I asked: ‘Is your question about Europe, Bill?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have two.’
His first was a long hypothetical question, which – and that was the journalism lesson of the day! – is exactly what you don’t ask a seventy-four-year-old man one hour and forty minutes into a two-hour interview late in the evening. To summate Rush’s first question: Suppose I’m the son of a Nazi officer and you awaken public attention to Nazi crimes and I go to my father and ask what this is about and he gives me an answer glamourizing what the Nazis did, isn’t the effect of your work the opposite of what you set out to do?
Wiesenthal bristled and, because I could see that not everyone understood that the question was hypothetical, I interjected that ‘it’s a little like what some of your Jewish enemies say about your “raking up the past.’” Rush started to ask his second question, but Simon said: ‘Let me answer your first question first.’
Almost compassionately, Wiesenthal might have been trying to ‘justify’ Rush’s hypothetical father to him with his reply. If so, there was no need, for Rush’s own father was an American soldier who, it turned out, had married an Austrian. Wiesenthal’s answer was:
‘The Nazi Party had ten and a half million members. Only one and a half per cent was involved in crimes. Among the membership was a large number of people who joined the party just to save their existence. It is the same as people in the Soviet Union who join the Communist Party because they have no other choice. So I am making differences among people who were Nazi Party members. Also, some of the people involved in crimes were not party members, but took advantage of the opportunities to kill, to rape people and property, in such times. With slaves, you can do anything.
‘Austria had about 700,000 party members. My office is concerned mainly with two or three thousand of them. The rest are for me without any value. I recognize that Austria was a victim of Nazi expansion. As an Austrian citizen, however, I feel that a former Nazi Party member should not be a minister of the government. We should remember that Austria had over 100,000 victims of Nazism, not all of them Jews. This is only, you might say, a matter of hygiene . . . I should also tell you that very often to my office come people who were party members and I talk with them about it.’
Adding that whatever his callers told him was between him and them, and implying that the ones who would come to him have little or nothing to hide, but are people of conscience, Wiesenthal added: ‘I have a dossier of letters from young people whose parents were in jail or even executed. They ask me to tell them if, in my opinion, their parents were guilty. I would say that I have a good name with such people if they ask me such a question.
‘And now,’ he said to Rush, ‘to your second question.’
This one was more succinct: ‘You’ve said you can’t live in Israel and that Poland is for you a cemetery. But I’m wondering why you took refuge here in Austria, where eighty per cent of the SS men and a lot of the Nazi hierarchy came from and many of the concentration camps were. Why not somewhere with a better record, like Switzerland? Why Austria?’
Phrased in various ways, it is a legitimate question I’d heard Simon asked often, and I’d heard him answer it many times, with retorts ranging from ‘I’m an Austrian citizen and I was born in the Austrian Empire! Why should I live somewhere else?’ to ‘The best way to keep an eye on the murderers of yesterday and tomorrow is to try to live among them.’ I had never heard him take umbrage at it before. This time, however, his reaction was explosive:
‘You know, I wish not to blame you, but I have talks with neo-Nazis and they are using your terminology absolutely – absolutely the same argument. And do you know what is my answer? So long as the criminals are free, the war has not ended for me. This is why I am in Austria. I work here. I have the right to be here. I was born in Austria. My father fought as an Austrian soldier. Why do you send me to Switzerland? Why don’t you send me to other countries? Why don’t you stop people on the street and say “Why do you live here? Why don’t you go to Sweden?” Why are you doing this to me? Why are you inviting me to go to other countries?’
If Simon stopped there, it might have been a legitimate overreaction. One might have excused the personal outburst and the interrogator’s finger pointing relentlessly at poor Rush. One could have chalked it up to a misunderstanding brought on by the unfocused first question, fatigue, and, above all, the Middle Eastern debate with Rime. But overreaction turned to overkill when Simon went on:
‘Don’t you see that this is an infection that we hoped was over? Before the Nazis started, there were here also a number of anti-Semites who said the Jews should go out.’
At this point, Rush put an apologetic word in edgewise, ‘I didn’t mean to ask you to make a choice’, and I tried to change the subject diplomatically: ‘We have time for two more questions.’
‘No,’ said Simon, standing up from his seat beside me at the head of the class. ‘No more questions. This last question was enough.’
‘I don’t think it was meant the way you’re taking it,’ I started to say to Simon, but Webster University’s European director, Dr Robert D. Brooks, who had been sitting in on this ‘distinguished guest lecture’, intervened, saying: ‘I don’t mean to be speaking for the student who asked it, but if I had asked it myself, I really would have meant whether you couldn’t operate more effectively in one of these other countries. I think that is the connotation with which it was asked.’
Simon’s response was: ‘Look, I am tired. Thank you.’ And he headed for the door.
Rime Allaf was the first to collect herself. With the instinct of a born hostess, even when it wasn’t her party, she said ‘Thank you very much’, and the class gave Wiesenthal a spontaneous burst of applause as he stormed out of the door.
When I phoned Simon the next morning, he said both of Rush’s questions were ‘a provocation’ and Rush was, after all, ‘the son of a Nazi officer; he said so himself.’ When I told him Rush’s real, rather than hypothetical, background, Simon said nothing.
The following Wednesday, Rime Allaf turned in a paper entitled ‘Justice, Wiesenthal Style’. Even in the heat of an argument in which she, too, had not distinguished herself morally, she had picked up the vibration that bothered me:
. . . During the first few days of the war, continued Wiesenthal, it was said that 600,000 people were made homeless. According to Wiesenthal, however, this was impossible. He said that only 400,000 people had been living in the area! To my dismay, Wiesenthal was speaking the way Eichmann had spoken years ago.
She seized on another quote from Wiesenthal: ‘My office is not working only against criminals that killed Jews. I am not making any difference as to who were the victims. As long as the criminals are free, the war is not over for me . . . My conscience forces me to bring the guilty ones to trial.’ And she asked: ‘Then why hasn’t his conscience forced him to bring to trial criminals like Begin?’
After chronicling Wiesenthal’s six prerequisites for genocide – hatred, dictatorship, bureaucracy, technology, time, and a minority as victim – Rime concluded:
They applied when the Jews were massacred. They still prevail when the Palestinians are being massacred. Yet Wiesenthal hardly seems motivated to hunt for the latters’ killers!
Having looked forward to this meeting, all in all I was not disappointed; Simon Wiesenthal’s words are not words one forgets. In him, my classmates and I saw the bitterness that is left over from so much suffering. We respected his work, understanding his need for ‘justice’, as he put it. I would have only wished that, as he spoke about the Arabs, he didn’t sound like a Nazi speaking about the Jews. Is it justice or just revenge you’re looking for, Mr Wiesenthal?
More than five years later, when I ran into Rime Allaf in Vienna – where her family had settled after her father retired from his $107,000-a-year UN post in 1987 – she took a certain perverse pride in having �
�inspired’ the title of Wiesenthal’s latest autobiography: Justice, Not Vengeance. And the last time I talked to Rime – in late 1992, by which time she had married Juan Canizares, a Spanish classical and flamenco guitarist – she took particular pride that her father had come out of retirement to head the Syrian delegation to the first postwar peace talks with Israel.
To this day, Simon still inquires after the doings of ‘your Syrian girl. I enjoyed arguing with her. She was good!’ But he insists she had nothing to do with his book’s title: ‘My whole life did.’
Around the time I bumped into Rime, I picked up a curious echo of her reaction to Wiesenthal from – of all people! – Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress: ‘Wiesenthal makes it sound like 1100 or 1200 war criminals – all the ones he says he’s caught plus a few others he’s still looking into – killed six million Jews, so why should we be looking for more, particularly in his back yard? Look, I had a glorified view of him for many years and now that I’ve met him – well, I try to keep the view of him I already had no matter what he says about me. And you have to give him credit that, over so many years, sometimes all by himself, he kept the issue of Nazi criminals alive when the whole world, even the Jews, wanted to forget. But I’ll tell you a couple of things I’ve learned about Wiesenthal since 1986: he may be a Galician by birth just as I’m one by ancestry, but he’s lived in Austria long enough to be as litigious as any of the natives – and they’re a litigious people. And the other thing about Wiesenthal is this: he only listens when he’s talking.’
Asher Ben Nathan sat in the lobby of a shiny new motel in a workers’ district of his native Vienna in 1987 spicing his breakfast with a fuming cigar. Having given a lecture on ‘Israel Yesterday and Today: from the Viewpoint of an Ex-Austrian’ at a Socialist Party institute the night before, the former Arthur Pier was free to reminisce about his postwar days in Austria forty years earlier. Head of the Jewish underground smuggling Displaced Persons into Palestine and founder of the first Documentation Centre in Vienna, the jaunty ‘Arthur’ had worked with Wiesenthal, Tuviah Friedman, and ‘Manos’ Diamant, among others, and remembered them well.
Reassigned back to Palestine in 1947, Asher Ben Nathan had entered the Foreign Service of the newborn nation of Israel in 1948 and risen through the ranks to become, in 1969, Israel’s first ambassador to West Germany. After four and a half years in Bonn, he was named ambassador to Paris and subsequently served as adviser to Shimon Peres, later Prime Minister. A brief flirtation with Labour Party politics, in which he ran for mayor of Tel Aviv and lost, had done little to subdue the sixty-six-year-old ‘Arthur’, who reappeared as a visitor to Vienna in early 1987 wearing an undiplomatic plaid jacket over more traditional grey flannel slacks.
Recalling the Wiesenthal of the late 1940s, Asher Ben Nathan said ‘our relationship was quite good for a while’, but acknowledged a coolness, if not a rift, which developed between the two Nazi-hunters even before he returned to Palestine. Mostly, he says, Wiesenthal made a career of Nazi-hunting ‘while I was concerned with refugees and Palestine and Israel in this hectic period, so I had no time for the politics and idiosyncrasies of the people with whom I worked – and, later, I went on to other tasks of my own. For me, it was a temporary mission; for him, it was his whole life.’
Still, there was more to it than that. ‘Whenever we meet, Wiesenthal and I,’ he volunteered, ‘we meet by chance and then he will embrace me, but we keep our distance. He never attempts to contact me because he knows that I know things about him that other people don’t know about. That’s all, so let’s leave it at that. I don’t want to say more.’
Asked if their estrangement had anything to do with Bruno Kreisky’s accusations that Simon collaborated in one way or another with the Gestapo, Asher Ben Nathan was quick to disclaim them: ‘All these accusations have been looked into in Israel. We concluded that the man was no hero and no saint, but there’s no proof of him being anything worse.’ And, pressed for more, he concluded: ‘Well, I’ve admired the way the man has grown into an elder statesman, an international personality. He’s much more sure of himself than the chap I met who was still living in a camp when we got to know each other. All the time his reputation was growing, he never tried to contact me. He did what he did, but I have my own ideas and he knows what I think. When we do meet, he never tries to get close and I certainly have no reason to.’
In his 1960 autobiography, Tuviah Friedman sketches the self-styled ‘desperado’ Wiesenthal who ‘had a dispute with “Arthur” and preferred to work on his own.’ Wiesenthal had little use for the Four Power politics among Austria’s military occupation governments and their relations with Pier’s ambitious fifth column of Jewish agents. ‘Listen, Tadek,’ Simon told Friedman. ‘Maybe your “Arthur” cares who finds Eichmann, but I don’t. I just want him found.’ In Friedman’s version of history (which both Simon and Asher Ben Nathan consider unreliable), Simon comes across as an any-means-to-an-end person and ‘Arthur’ doesn’t.
If there has been a recurrent motif in Simon’s later years, it has been his use of ‘I am not a hater’ almost to the extent of cliché. Whether applied to Ukrainians, Kreisky, or the World Jewish congress (or anybody except, perhaps, Elie Wiesel), it has informed his life through the slings and arrows of the Waldheim affair and beyond. It made him, in his eighties, a more mature person than the man who stormed out of Webster University when nearing seventy-five – and this is not always the direction in which the elderly age. I caught a glimpse of this dimension (and of how grandly Simon was ageing) in late 1988, a few weeks before his eightieth birthday, when I confronted him with Asher Ben Nathan’s 1987 quotes about him.
Simon reacted positively at first, as though congratulated: ‘He is absolutely right that I was growing. Also he is right when he says I am no hero, no saint; I am just an ordinary man.’ Then, after a brief pause to allow his listener to dispute this, Simon went on: ‘This man was a hero of mine. In those times, we looked upon those people who were coming from Palestine to us as supermen. Later, we found out they were human beings just like us.
‘My difficulties with him were never about him because he did very good work in Austria and later in Germany and France. They were about the people who worked for him. We disagreed over his friends. Some of his friends were not my friends. So there were little jealousies on their part, which must have hurt his opinion of me, but, more than that, some of the Jews he used had held functions under the Nazis. And, even when they had functioned honourably, it was my policy – Lex Wiesenthal – never to employ people who were compromised. OK, “Arthur” thought otherwise – and I should make it clear that he used them only for the benefit of his job, not for personal benefit.
‘I still like the man very much. When his son died in the Yom Kippur War I went to him and his wife in Paris to tell them how sorry I felt that such a thing had happened to their son and to them and that such things still happen to people just because they are Jews. And, if we haven’t spent much time together lately, it’s because I think of him as too important and busy a man for me to waste his time. Like I said, he was a hero of mine.’
Was he still?
‘Look,’ said Simon, ‘the next time he and I meet, I won’t say anything to him about what he said to you, but I’ll know to spend more time with him. So thank you. I would hate for either of us to go to the grave feeling coolness about the other.’
43
‘I wish not to provoke the Lord’
In 1999, soon after turning ninety, Simon Wiesenthal gave up driving. He also stopped celebrating birthdays in Israel with his daughter, grandchildren and great-grandson. ‘Instead, they come to me all year round. [Daughter] Pavlina is arriving with her husband next week. When they are here, this is for me vacation,’ he told me in his own eloquent English when I visited him in Vienna early in 2002, three weeks after his ninety-third birthday on New Year’s Eve. ‘So I stay here all the time. I wish not to provoke the Lord.’
Life goes on
for the venerable Nazi-hunter – and that in itself is his ultimate victory over the dwindling ranks of World War II criminals who survive uncaught: to outlive them.
‘It’s my situation,’ he says philosophically, ‘but I’m not responsible for it.’
Would he like to outlive Alois Brunner, the master genocidist? Four years Wiesenthal’s junior, the Austrian-born Brunner was Eichmann’s enforcer in Vienna and Prague in 1938–9 and later in Bratislava, Paris and Greece. Still in Syria after half a century, Brunner has been silent since the death of his protector, President Hafez al-Assad, in 2000. Wiesenthal’s information is that ‘Brunner is probably alive and somewhere in Syria, but is no more in the capital, Damascus. Still, he is safe in Syria because there to kill Jews is not a crime . . . But I don’t think about outliving him and maybe he doesn’t think about me. When I came out of the war alive in 1945, that was victory for me.’
His three secretaries take turns chauffeuring him to and from his Jewish Documentation Center in downtown Vienna. On doctor’s orders, Wiesenthal spends only five mornings a week in the office, but one of the secretaries told me he takes his work home with him every noon.
‘I am ninety-three years old and I am every day in the office. Why?’ he said more rhetorically than boastfully. ‘Because this is my life. After fifty-six years, you cannot overnight change and say “OK, I sit home.” If I sit home, I am waiting for the death. Here, I still get many letters and I answer them. But some of the letters I am sorry I didn’t get thirty years before.’
‘Are there no more Nazis left to catch?’ I asked him.
‘No European Nazis more. Old Nazis, no,’ he replied. ‘If they are from my generation, they live now overseas – in South America. And their children and grandchildren are not more Nazis. They are hoping for a better life. But there are other young people, the new Nazis, who wish to carry on in the old way. They worry me.’
