Nazi Hunter (13 page)

He drew a uniformed Hitler peeling off his moustached mask to reveal the SS death’s head beneath it. And a portrait of a larger-than-life Himmler etched into the brick wall of a
crematorium with a long line of human fuel marching into the door of his fiery gut. With polemic passion, he wrote beneath it: ‘Insatiable, the death factory works day and night –
insatiable as the devil’s helper Himmler himself: “The smoke clouds must roll toward victory! Too little raw material for the chimney! Too few dead! Too few dead! Too few!’”
Between 1938 and 1945, more than 130,000 died in Mauthausen.

On Friday night, 4 May 1945, the last SS men disappeared from the camp. The next morning, nobody came to count or collect the dead. An emaciated Wiesenthal, weighing just ninety pounds,
struggled out to the courtyard to see for himself that there was no roll-call. It was a bright, sunny spring morning with a scent of pine in the air rather than the usual smell of burning flesh
from the crematorium. Toward ten o’clock, instead of Himmler’s smoke clouds, a big grey tank with a white star on its side rolled in flying an American flag from its turret.

‘Every star was a star of hope,’ says Wiesenthal. ‘I was about a hundred fifty yards away from the first tank, but I wanted to touch one of those stars.’ From the death
barracks staggered other living corpses, waving their own long-hidden national flags or newly woven versions of the Stars and Stripes. ‘I had survived to see this day, but I couldn’t
make the last fifty yards.’ When his knees crumpled, he fell on his face.

An American GI in green combat fatigues lifted him up. Wiesenthal couldn’t speak, couldn’t even move his mouth, but he
pointed to the tank and was brought to
it. Touching the white star of hope on the cold grey armour, he fainted into freedom for the ninth liberation of his life.

8

Upon seeing the skeletons who staggered out to greet them on 5 May 1945, the Americans of the 65th Division who rode to Mauthausen’s rescue had requisitioned every potato
in the area. For many that they ‘saved’, however, it was already too late. Some 3000 inmates died in the weeks
after
the liberation of Mauthausen. Some were too weak or sick to
recover from their ordeal. Others left the camp too soon, for one had to be strong to survive in war-ravaged Europe.

Simon Wiesenthal awoke on his bunk to the aroma of real soup. It was so delicious that he took too much of it – and threw up. But he survived his good fortune and the American medics
nursed him back to health. ‘Others were not so lucky,’ he says. ‘There were those who died
because
they were being helped. The Americans gave out canned lard and corned
beef, which can be fetal in big doses to those who have been living on four hundred calories a day. So they survived hell only to die at the gate of paradise.’

No sooner could he navigate on his own, after about ten days, than he set out for a walk in the surrounding countryside. Past a pastoral scene of children playing and farmers tilling their soil,
he strolled towards the village until, after not quite a mile, he felt weak and fatigued. At a farmhouse, he asked for a glass of water and was given grape juice by a strapping Austrian peasant
woman who could tell, by one glance at his gaunt face and loose clothes, whence this scarecrow hailed. Nodding in the direction of the camp, she asked him: ‘Was it bad over there?’

‘Be glad you didn’t see the camp from the inside,’ Wiesenthal told her.

‘Why should
I
have seen it?’ she said. ‘I’m not a Jew.’

Wiesenthal winced with what he calls
Merz Schmerz
: the pain caused by first fulfilment of
Rottenführer
Mcrz’s prophecy, in Poland less than a
year earlier, that nobody after the war would care to believe his testimony. He drank his grape juice and left.

Implicit in the response of this woman – relatively well fed, but generous and surely not guilty of any wrong-doing – was a prevailing attitude of ‘this is what happens to
Jews’ and ‘this is what happens to the rest of us’. But the
Merz Schmerz
that the Upper Austrian farm woman unwittingly handed to Simon to digest with his cup of grape
juice was part of the potion that transformed a ninety-six-pound victim and survivor of the Holocaust into its avenging archangel.

In the weeks, months, and years to come, Wiesenthal would hear many Austrians and ‘good Germans’ volunteering to him that they ‘knew nothing about what was happening’ or
had even ‘saved some Jews’. To this, his private reaction is vehement:

‘If all the Jews had been saved that I was told about in those first few months, there would have been more Jews alive at the end of the war than when it began. I also stop believing after
a while when people try to convince me they knew absolutely nothing. Maybe they knew not the whole truth about what went on inside the death camps. But all of them must have noticed
something
after Hitler invaded Austria on March eleventh, 1938. They couldn’t help seeing Jewish neighbours taken away by men in black SS uniforms. Their children came home from
school and reported that their Jewish classmates had been kicked out. They saw the swastikas on the broken windows of looted Jewish stores. They had to walk around the rubble of synagogues
destroyed during
Kristallnacht
in 1938. People knew what was going on, although many were ashamed and chose to look the other way so they wouldn’t see too much. Soldiers and officers
on leave from the eastern front came home and talked about massacres of the Jews there. People knew much more than they admitted, even to themselves, which is why today so many suffer from an acute
sense of guilt.’ Wiesenthal’s words are as good a diagnosis as any of what is now known in Austria as
Waldheimer’s Disease
.

Retreating from the traumas of
Merz Schmerz
and pre-
Waldheimer’s Disease
, Wiesenthal returned to the Mauthausen camp, where a
new
blow awaited him. The stronger survivors who had no place to go yet were running the barracks. A Polish trusty named Kazimierz Rusinek pounced on Simon for no good reason and knocked him
unconscious. When Wiesenthal woke up, friends had carried him to his bunk. ‘What has he got against you?’ one of them asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Simon said. ‘Maybe he’s angry because I’m still alive.’

His friends told him: ‘You must report this to the Americans.’. . . ‘We’re no longer sub-humans; we’re free men.’. . . ‘We’ll go with you
tomorrow, when you’re feeling a little better.’

Wiesenthal agreed to go because ‘if you can beat a skeleton, what else could such a person have done?’ When they went to the camp headquarters next morning, the commander, Colonel
Richard Seibel, listened and said: ‘We have a special branch for that. It’s called War Crimes.’

At an office with a handwritten sign, a young lieutenant named Mann heard Wiesenthal’s story, his witnesses, and the words of a doctor who’d treated him. ‘You’ll hear
from us,’ the officer said brusquely.

That night in the barracks, Rusinek apologized to Wiesenthal before all his friends and extended his hand. Wiesenthal accepted his apology, but did not give him his hand. Though Rusinek later
became communist Poland’s Vice-Minister of Culture and a leading anti-Semitic propagandist, Simon says that at the time ‘he wasn’t important. He was already part of the past. What
was important was what else I’d seen at the War Crimes office: SS men being interrogated by the Americans, begging cigarettes from their captors, being guarded and translated by former
prisoners, and cringing whenever their paths crossed a Jew’s. One of them used to whip us in the face if we didn’t get out of his way fast enough; now he was trembling, just as we had
trembled before him. I had seen nervous German soldiers before, but never a frightened SS man. I used to think of the SS as the strong men, the élite, of a perverted regime. But now I saw
that supermen become cowards in the moment they are no longer protected by guns. Only two weeks had gone by and the élite of the Thousand Year Reich were fighting each other for cigarette
butts.’

A few days later, he went to the War Crimes Office to thank Lieutenant Mann and offer his services. The young officer listened to
him sympathetically, but pointed out that
Simon had no investigatory experience. And besides, he added, ‘How much do you weigh?’

‘Fifty-six kilos [123 lbs],’ Wiesenthal lied.

Laughing, the lieutenant told him: ‘Wiesenthal, go take it easy for a while and come back and see me when you really
do
weigh fifty-six kilos.’

The Americans tried to persuade him to return to Poland, where architects were sorely needed. ‘First you’ll be sent to a sanatorium to build you up,’ they told him. ‘Then
you’ll go home and build houses for people who need them.’ His home city of Lvov, however, was already being absorbed into the Soviet Union, where he knew private housing had no
priority at all. But that wasn’t why he told them thank you, but no, thank you.

‘Every house I built is gone. I have lost my mother, my father, my wife, and ninety relatives in Poland,’ he explained. ‘Poland is for me a cemetery. Every tree, every stone
would remind me of whole tragedies. How can you ask me to live in a cemetery?’

The image he used was hardly amiss, for Poland was worse than a cemetery for many like him. Even though the Poles had lost the second-highest number put to death by the Nazis (three million,
including half of those who had higher educations), anti-Semitism was even more rampant among the living than before the war. Jewish survivors were shunned as ghosts returning from the dead to
reclaim property that Poles had long since appropriated.

In his definitive 1985 chronicle of
The Holocaust
, the Oxford historian Martin Gilbert – who also co-scripted the 1983 Academy Award-winning documentary
Genocide
for the
Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles – writes that ‘within seven months of the end of the war in Europe, and after a year in which no German soldier was on Polish soil, 350 Jews had
been murdered in Poland.’ Among them were Chaim Hirszman, one of the only two miraculous survivors of Belzec (where Wiesenthal’s mother and half a million others perished in 1942), and
five survivors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen – one of them a twenty-two-year-old woman – who were flagged down at what looked like a police checkpoint along the main road to
Nowy Targ on Easter Sunday of 1946, ordered out of their car, shot to death on the spot, stripped of their clothes, and left naked on the highway. Their uniformed killers were former Polish
partisans.

No wonder that, learning of these events and even losing an acquaintance or two in Poland’s postwar holocaust, Simon Wiesenthal saw his native land as one vast Jewish
cemetery. What he didn’t know yet was that the casualty who mattered most to him, his young wife Cyla, was alive in that cemetery.

As ‘Irena Kowalska’, Cyla hadn’t died in the German attack on Topiel Street after the Warsaw uprising; she had slipped away into darkness a few minutes before flame-throwers
illuminated and incinerated the whole block. When the battle was over and survivors rounded up, she, as a ‘Gentile’, had ‘only’ been deported to forced labour in a German
machine-gun factory near Gelsenkirchen, which was liberated by the British on 11 April 1945, while her ‘late’ husband lay dying in Mauthausen.

Having believed for almost a year that her husband had slashed his wrists in Gestapo custody, Cyla Wiesenthal told the British authorities that she was not Irena Kowalska, but a Jew and the
widow of an architect named Simon Wiesenthal. At British headquarters, she was persuaded she had no choice other than to return to Lvov and begin life anew in Soviet Russia. She was given a
railroad ticket and, in June, she and a woman friend headed behind the Iron Curtain on a journey which, if completed, surely would have been one-way. At one point, they passed within thirty miles
of Simon.

With a little weight under his belt and some improvised rouge on his cheeks to give an illusion of good health, Simon Wiesenthal applied again to the War Crimes office at
Mauthausen.

‘Hey, Wiesenthal!’ Lieutenant Mann greeted him. ‘Did that Polish fella beat you up again? Your face is all red.’