Nazi Hunter (14 page)

Wiesenthal assured him he would heal overnight and came to the point: ‘You liberated me, you saved my life, but I don’t know what to do with my life. I have nobody and nothing to
live for, but I could find a meaning for my life by helping you with your work. I’ve seen a lot and I have a good memory. Men and women have been murdered before my eyes. I can give you names
and dates and sometimes addresses. I can help you find the criminals and, when you interrogate them, the most important thing is to ask the right questions – and those I have.’

Mann had him write a letter to Colonel Seibel, to which he appended accounts of crimes he had witnessed or learned about. To Simon’s own amazement, his chronicle
contained ‘the names of ninety-one men who had to be brought to trial if my need for justice was to be satisfied.’

Three weeks after the liberation of Mauthausen, Simon was accepted. He was sent out with a US Army captain and his jeep-driver to patrol the Mauthausen area for former SS guards from the camp
who were hiding in the countryside. ‘You didn’t have to go far,’ he remembers. ‘You almost stumbled over them.’ After a while, the captain, bored with the sameness of
it all and tired of plucking quavering ex-supermen from their wives or girlfriends, would send Simon inside to make the arrests.

Wiesenthal’s first ‘client’ had the everyday name of Schmidt. Taking him into custody was almost situation comedy. Schmidt lived up two steep flights of stairs, and Wiesenthal
arrived out of breath to arrest him. On the way down, Wiesenthal – still weak from the ordeals Schmidt and his superiors had inflicted on him at Mauthausen – felt so faint that he had
to sit down hard on a step. After a couple of minutes, ‘Schmidt helped me as we walked down the stairway together. He could have easily tried to run away. If he had given me a slight shove, I
would have fallen down the stairs and he could have escaped out the back door. But Schmidt didn’t even think of running away. Instead, he held me by the arm and helped me down. It was absurd
– like a rabbit carrying a hunting-dog.’

In the jeep, Schmidt began to cry. ‘I was only a little person,’ he blubbered. ‘I just obeyed orders. Why pick on me and let the big fish swim free? I’ve done nothing
wrong. I swear to you: I risked my own neck just to help prisoners.’

Now the ex-prisoner he had just helped down the stairs turned on Schmidt with a sarcastic snarl: ‘Yes, you helped prisoners. I saw you often. You helped them on the way to the
crematorium.’ Schmidt was silent for the rest of the trip.

When Austria was partitioned for a decade by the Americans, British, French, and Russians, Mauthausen fell into the Soviet military zone of occupation. The US War Crimes Office moved its
operations across the Danube to Linz, the capital city of the province of Upper Austria. Mauthausen inmates working for the Americans were lodged in a Displaced Persons camp in the public school of
Leonding, a small town near Linz. That school was where Adolf Hitler had begun his education, and Wiesenthal remembers: ‘We slept on cots in a classroom whose windows
looked out on a small house that was the former home of Hitler’s parents. They were buried in the cemetery at the end of the road. I didn’t particularly like the view from the room and
moved out of the school after a few days. I rented a modest furnished room on the Landstrasse in Linz. Not much of a room, really, but from the window I could see a small garden.’

By taking that room with a view at Landstrasse 40, Wiesenthal had once again jumped from frying-pan to fire. Not only was his new address conveniendy just two doors up from the War Crimes Office
at Landstrasse 36, but it was only two more doors away from Landstrasse 32, the house where one Adolf Eichmann – born in the German city of Solingen thirty-nine years earlier – had
spent his youth and where his father and stepmother still lived. They were known as the ‘Elektro’ Eichmanns, for Karl Adolf Eichmann, head of Linz’s electric streetcar works for
many years, now owned an electrical appliance store there.

Having begun to hear from Hungarian Jews at Mauthausen about Adolf Eichmann as the driving force behind their deportations, Wiesenthal was one of the first on his trail. At Simon’s behest,
the Americans searched the father’s house and found no traces of the eldest child. When they sought a photo of the prodigal son – considered the least successful of the five Eichmann
offspring – there wasn’t any. Besides, Adolf Eichmann had taken care never to discuss his work or encourage picture-taking.

On 1 August, Wiesenthal received a tip that Eichmann was hiding at house number 8 in Fischerndorf, a section of the village of Alt Aussee, near the war’s last SS redoubt. He notified Army
Counter-Intelligence (CIC), which asked the Austrian police to bring Eichmann in. The police went by mistake to number 38, where they found an SS captain named Anton Burger with a formidable cache
of weapons and ammunition. They arrested him and called it a day’s work well done.

Burger, a former deputy commandant of the Theresienstadt concentration camp at Terezín in what had been (and was again) Czechoslovakia, had also served on Eichmann’s staff.
Wiesenthal often cites this case of mistaken identity as an example of the postwar
chaos with hot-and cold-running SS men seemingly lurking behind every door. But he was not
too surprised, for so much Nazi loot was hidden in the
Ausseerland
that its population of 18,000 in 1944 had more than quadrupled in 1945. ‘Allowing for a few thousand German
soldiers,’ Wiesenthal wondered, ‘who were these sixty thousand civilians who’d arrived during the months before the collapse of the Third Reich?’ The answer was that the
people who’d known where the bodies were buried now knew where the SS’s stolen treasure was buried – and wanted to stay close to it.

When Wiesenthal learned that the Austrians had netted Burger instead of the bigger fish he was seeking, he asked the CIC to do the job itself. An American agent went to Fischerndorf 8 and found
a woman named Veronika Liebl, which happened to be Frau Adolf Eichmann’s maiden name. Yes, she was the same Veronika Liebl, she said, but she’d divorced her husband in Prague that April
and hadn’t seen him since. She had their three sons – Klaus, Dieter, and Horst – with her and wouldn’t say why she had divorced their father. Wiesenthal told the CIC she
bore watching in case her ‘ex-husband’ paid a visit.

In Linz, Wiesenthal worked mornings for the War Crimes Office and afternoons for a new Jewish Committee, of which he became vice-chairman. Later, its two rooms became the headquarters of the
Jewish Central Committee for the US Zone in Austria – and a Mecca for displaced Jews asking the eternal question after a disaster:
‘Who else is alive?’
But unlike an
earthquake or even a nuclear attack, the Holocaust had scattered its survivors and victims across the map of Europe, with most records of them strewn to the wind, destroyed, or non-existent.

The same chaos and lack of communications enabled the criminals who had torn these families apart, usually forever, to live in American custody under their own names, as Dr Josef Mengele and
Franz Stangl did, or under such pseudonyms as ‘Memling’ for Mengele and ‘Lieutenant Eckmann’ for Colonel Eichmann. And it meant that the tide of human misery and eternal
hope would drive many of these refugees behind what would not formally be identified as an Iron Curtain until 5 March 1946 (by Sir Winston Churchill in a speech in Fulton, Missouri), but was
already enmeshing much of Eastern Europe and enveloping hundreds of thousands of innocents in its swirls even before Hitler’s machinery had ground to a halt.

As with all of Wiesenthal’s postwar organizations, the Jewish Committee’s basic function was making lists, not righting wrongs. From information can come
justice – which is why the Soviets were suppressing facts. Survivors who came to Wiesenthal to ask after loved ones or friends were asked where
they
were from. Lists of known
survivors, arranged by city or town, were compiled at Committee headquarters. Wiesenthal and his colleagues worked nights transcribing names from all sources while, outside their door, anxious
people waited in line all night for what Wiesenthal called ‘a glance that might mean hope or despair’. Sometimes, there were brawls and scuffles and once, in a fight for the same fist,
two men tore it up. On another occasion, two men in fine argued impatiently over who was next to see a list that a third man was studying. When it became a face-to-face confrontation, they suddenly
embraced – for they were brothers who had been seeking each other for weeks.

Wiesenthal recalls ‘moments of silent despair when someone discovered that the person he was looking for had been there only a few days before, looking for him. They had missed each other.
Where should one look now? Others scanned the lists of survivors, hoping against hope to find the names of people they had seen killed before their very eyes. Everybody had heard of some
miracle.’

Wiesenthal, who at that time hardly believed in God, rabbis, or miracles, seldom studied his lists, for ‘I had no hope my wife was alive. When I thought of her, I thought of her body lying
under a heap of rubble and I wondered whether they had found the bodies and buried her. In a moment of illogical hope, I wrote to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. They
promptly answered that my wife was dead.’

Knowing that his mother had no grave in the ashes of Belzec, he hoped that at least his wife did. A decent burial had become an ambition – even an obsession – to Wiesenthal when, on
work details in Lemberg, he was marched past the German soldiers’ cemetery where ‘on each grave there was planted a sunflower, as straight as a soldier on parade.’ (This theme
would give thrust and title to his best book,
The Sunflower
, in 1970.)

One night in the summer of 1945, while working on the list of survivors from Cracow, he came across the name and address of a former high-school classmate of his and Cyla’s from Buczacz: a
Dr Biener. Wiesenthal wrote a letter to Cracow, telling Biener that
Cyla was dead. Just in case her body still lay beneath the ruins of Topiel Street number 5 in Warsaw, some
150 miles away, would Biener please go there and see what he could find? Since there was no postal service to Poland, Wiesenthal gave the letter to an illegal courier who specialized in moving mail
across Czechoslovakia to Poland for a price.

Cyla Wiesenthal’s welcome to Poland was typical of the times. After crossing the frontier from Czechoslovakia at Bohumin, she and her friend boarded a night train to
Lvov. The train went as far as Cracow before a four-hour delay was announced. In the Cracow station, Cyla’s suitcase – containing everything she owned – was stolen.

To cheer Cyla up, her companion suggested they take a stroll through the medieval city, miraculously spared a few months earlier. Mined and wired for destruction by the retreating Germans,
Cracow had survived when Polish partisans cut the main detonator cable at the very last minute. Glorious Cracow, however, was foggy and dreary that summer morning – until Cyla heard her name
being called. Out of the fog stepped a dentist named Landek, whom she and Simon had known in Lvov. Landek ‘knew’ that Simon was dead and expressed his condolences. Then he told Cyla
that perhaps Dr Biener might know more about how her husband met his end.

‘Dr Biener from Buczacz?’ said Cyla. ‘Is he in Cracow?’

‘He lives five minutes from here,’ Landek told her, giving her the address.

Reaching Dr Biener’s home, Cyla asked her friend to wait downstairs so she could receive the grim details of Simon’s demise in private. Then she climbed up three flights and rang a
bell marked
BIENER
.

When Dr Biener answered, he
knew
he was seeing a ghost, so he slammed the door in her face.

Cyla had come prepared to be upset, but not rebuffed. Pounding on the door, she shouted: ‘Open up! It’s Cyla! Cyla Wiesenthal! Cyla Müller from Buczacz! Simon’s
wife!’

Dr Biener opened the door cautiously and said: ‘But you’re dead. I just got a letter.’

‘I’m very much alive,’ Cyla assured him. ‘You’d look half-dead, too, if you’d had the train ride I’d had.’

Dr Biener let her in and explained: ‘Yesterday, I had a letter from
your husband. Simon says you died when the Germans destroyed your house in Warsaw.’

Now it was Cyla’s turn to blanch: ‘Simon? But he’s been dead for more than a year.’

‘Then who is writing to me from Linz?’ Biener responded. ‘Here, read his letter.’

Cyla called to her travelling companion to come upstairs and pinch her in case she was dreaming.

Simon Wiesenthal has believed in miracles ever since: ‘If my letter hadn’t reached Dr Biener the day before, if Cyla’s train hadn’t been delayed, if she hadn’t gone
for that walk, if she hadn’t met Landek, if Dr Biener hadn’t been at home, then the two women would have gone back to the station and continued their journey to Russia. Cyla might have
wound up anywhere in the Soviet Union and it would have taken years to find her again, let alone get her out of there.’

It was much harder to send letters from Cracow to Linz than in the other direction. While Cyla was writing three identical letters to Simon, Dr Biener hunted up illegal couriers who wanted
payment in advance, but wouldn’t guarantee delivery. Only one of the letters ever arrived: the one that went the longest way around – via Budapest.

It took five weeks, but it will take more than Simon Wiesenthal’s lifetime for him to forget the moment he saw his wife’s familiar handwriting on an unexpected letter from the
‘dead’.

By then, Simon’s employer was the office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency) in Linz. His captain wouldn’t give him permission to travel through the
Soviet military zone to fetch his wife because he possessed so much confidential knowledge of American security. The OSS did arrange travel documents for Cyla, but since there was no postal
communication, someone very reliable would have to take them to her.

A friend from the Jewish Committee, Dr Felix Weisberg, a PhD from Cracow, offered to be Cyla’s escort. His romantic mission was as fraught with fear and miscalculation as any in
Romeo
and Juliet
. Crossing Czechoslovakia, Weisberg saw an NKVD road-block up ahead and was warned it was ‘very strict’. Fearing what the Russians might do to anyone carrying
Amerikansky dokumenty
, Weisberg destroyed them. But the NKVD didn’t even search him, and it was
only after he was safely past that he realized he had destroyed
Cyla’s Cracow address and couldn’t remember it at all.