Nazi Hunter (12 page)

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

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.’

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, T
he 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.’

When the convoy arrived at the railroad station at Mauthausen in Upper Austria on a cold, clear Friday night, only 1200 of the original 3000 passengers were still alive.
Another 180 died on the four-mile uphill hike they were forced to make from the station to the camp.

Wiesenthal was almost one of the casualties. Trudging over frozen snow, with each man’s steps crackling thunderously like drums of doom in the silence of the night, he linked arms with a
Polish prince named Radziwill, a relative of the one who later married Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ sister Lee Bouvier. For a while, Wiesenthal and Radziwill kept each other up, but when they
couldn’t go any farther, they simply sank into the snow.

‘Are you alive?’ a voice barked in German and, to remedy this condition, its owner fired at them. But the SS guard’s hands were cold and his shot landed in the snow between
Wiesenthal and Radziwill. Then the two men drifted into sleep as life and death passed them by.

Well before dawn, the camp authorities sent trucks down to collect corpses and spare the sensibilities of villagers going to work in the morning. Frozen stiff, Wiesenthal and Radziwill were
taken for dead and flung aboard with a pile of bodies. Simon doesn’t know whether it was the motion or the warmth of the other bodies that revived them a little, but when the truck delivered
them to the camp crematorium, the prisoners working there noticed that both men weren’t quite dead. They carried Wiesenthal and Radziwill to a shower-room, removed their clothes, and immersed
them in cold water. When both were conscious, though faint and dizzy, they were smuggled into the ‘death barracks’, where prisoners too weak to work were left to die.

There Wiesenthal lay for almost three months: a hundred-pound cadaver who drank down his daily ration of200 calories of soup that stank. So did the barracks – with the smells of sickness,
pus, death, and prisoners sleeping two or three to a bunk, some never to awaken. So awful was the stench that the SS men wouldn’t even poke their heads inside. A guard would simply stand
outside the door and take a one-question morning census: ‘How many died last night?’ Later in the day, a crematorium detail would collect the corpses.

‘Sometimes,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘we thought we were the last men alive on earth. We had lost touch with reality. We didn’t know whether anybody else was still
alive.’

As Simon Wiesenthal lay dying in Mauthausen in the last weeks of the war, he used the pencils and paper he had acquired to draw the living (and dying) hell
just outside the door of the death barracks. For the concentration camp, which supplied paving stones for Vienna and other Austrian cities, was built around a 186-step-deep rock quarry. Here, Jews
and other enemies of fascism – Spanish republicans, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses – were worked or shot or flung to death. Only ten per cent of the prisoners were
German or Austrian. On 31 March 1943, to entertain Heinrich Himmler on an official visit, a thousand Dutch Jews had been tossed off the rim of the pit to smash to death 165 feet below; from then
on, the SS referred to this recurrent ritual as ‘parachute jumping’.

In the first four months of 1945, more than 30,000 perished at Mauthausen: many from brutality, but more from exhaustion, starvation, and disease. Mauthausen was a slave-labour camp for
men
¹⁶
– and they died ‘natural’ deaths which caused the fewest extermination problems for the SS. By April, there was no water
for washing in the camp. ‘We were swarming with lice and filth,’ a survivor remembers. ‘We would sometimes pull out some two hundred lice on each of us. When I would sit down and
try to rise, I would get dizzy and see nothing for a couple of minutes. That’s how weak we were.’ After an Allied air raid, prisoners ate the flesh of fallen inmates who died when a
bomb hit part of the camp.

Rarely able to venture from his bunk, but allowed the privacy of the dead, Wiesenthal sat up to sketch the sadistic commandant, Franz Ziereis, who boasted of giving his son ‘fifty Jews for
target practice’ as a birthday present and over whose desk was framed a poem that read:

He drew the stone quarry as the gateway to Dante’s inferno and later, for a 1946 booklet honouring the first year of liberation of Mauthausen, he captioned what it
showed: ‘Building the pyramids was a preview in which hundreds of thousands of slaves perished. In the stone quarry, every SS bandit felt like a pharaoh. Just as in ancient Egypt, giant
blocks of stone – never lighter than 110 pounds, by Himmler’s order – were carried by human bodies. An SS man sat atop such a block, cracking his whip to make work merrier –
for him!’ Today, Simon Wiesenthal cannot bear to look at the pyramids of Egypt without thinking of Mauthausen and the tiny Jewish slave at the bottom bearing the wonder of the world on his
frail shoulders.