Nazi Hunter (5 page)

As for the Poles, ‘they did not like us Jews – and that was no new thing. Our fathers had crept out of the confines of the ghetto into the open world. They had worked hard and done
all they could to be recognized by their fellow creatures. But it was all in vain. If the Jews shut themselves away from the rest of the world, they were foreign bodies. If they left their own
world and conformed, they were undesirable immigrants to be hated and rejected. Even in my youth, I realized I’d been born a second-class citizen.

‘A wise man,’ Wiesenthal goes on, ‘once said that the Jews were the salt of the earth. But the Poles thought their land had been ruined by over-salting. Compared with Jews in
other countries, therefore, we were maybe better prepared for what the Nazis had in store for us.’ And maybe, he adds, ‘made more resistant.’

At the Humanistic Gymnasium of Buczacz – where Jewish parents and ambitious Poles sent their children to learn Latin and Greek in hope of going on to university in Lwów or Warsaw
– Szymon met a comely dark-blonde Jewish classmate, Cyla Müller, a distant relative of the Moravian-born Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (who was, in turn, no relation to
Wiesenthal’s maternal Grandma Freud). Szymon and Cyla fell in love and it was taken for granted by all who knew them, including their parents, that the high-school sweethearts would one day
marry.

Though that day didn’t come until 1936, when Szymon was twenty-seven, the young couple kept close company even after Szymon’s mother remarried in 1925 and moved to the town of Dolina
in the Carpathian Mountains, where her new husband owned a tile factory. Though his brother went with her, Szymon remained in Buczacz to finish his studies. He visited his family often and took to
the Carpathian countryside with zest, riding horses and hiking as well as vacationing whenever he could in the mountain resort of Zakopane, where ‘in summer were the woods, sunshine, peace;
in winter was good skiing.’

Early in 1926, in the final hour of which he turned eighteen, Szymon registered with the Polish military authorities for future
conscription. The following year, however,
his grandfather’s favour of enrolling him as the first baby of 1909 came home to haunt him. Two policemen arrived to arrest him for failing to register for military service in 1927. Facing
jail or immediate induction, Szymon protested that he’d registered in 1926. This was to no avail: boys born in 1909 had to register in 1927. The 1908-model Szymon Wiesenthal was not their
concern, the authorities said, unless this Szymon they had in custody could prove conclusively that he was one and the same. A Polish magistrate told Wiesenthal to produce two witnesses to swear
affidavits that they knew him during the half-hour of his life that he purported to have spent in 1908.

Having to prove his existence hardly fazed the early Wiesenthal. Scouring Buczacz for ‘witnesses who’d remember, to the exact minute, something that had happened almost twenty years
ago’, he found two neighbours who
did
remember the midwife’s announcement preceding the proud father’s uncorking a bottle of schnapps at midnight. That detail, says
Wiesenthal, ‘convinced the magistrate and settled the matter, so my birthday was legally recognized and they had to look elsewhere for the younger Szymon Wiesenthal.’ Still, this first
formal brush with bureaucracy set him thinking about his identity crisis: ‘What if it had not been New Year’s Eve? What if it had been just an ordinary night with no party, no
witnesses? Then where would I be?’

His status clarified, he was now able to obtain a student deferment to study architecture – not at the Technical University in Lwów, the Galician provincial capital where there was
a Jewish quota, but at the Czech Technical University in Prague. The golden city on the Moldau
⁸
proved not only an architectural revelation, but also
– in the post-World War I democracy that Czechoslovak President Tomáš G. Masaryk created with the help of his friend Woodrow Wilson – a truly liberating experience to a
young Polish Jew who had been ‘liberated’ too many times by vicious anti-Semites.

It was in the student cellars of Prague that the gregarious raconteur his friends now know emerged from the shadows of caution and discretion to shine as a master of ceremonies and even a
stand-up comedian. Later, back in Lwów, he would edit a satiric student weekly called
Omnibus
, which made fun of communists and Nazis
and of which he suspects
‘the Polish Ministry of Interior must have a complete archive because every week the censor confiscated us for one reason or another’ – an offending cartoon or a biting
feuilleton. ‘We had many a joke together,’ he recalls of his student days, ‘we who were young with life stretching before us.’ But Simon, at least, could sense the most
ominous shadow enveloping Europe.

In 1932, Simon’s senior year, Adolf Hitler was storming the threshold of power in Germany and, near Prague’s ghetto of the golem
⁹
and
Franz Kafka, Wiesenthal was a regular attraction at a Jewish students’ cabaret. ‘You know,’ he told an appreciative audience of Jewish and Gentile students in the spring of that
year, ‘we Jews have always managed to get something good to eat out of even our worst tragedies. After Pharaoh, we have matzoh for Passover. After Haman, we have
Hamantashen
¹⁰
for Purim. And, after Hitler, oh what a feast we’ll have!’

Sixty years after he told it, I asked Simon Wiesenthal what he thought of his joke now. ‘It may have been funny then, but it isn’t funny now,’ he replied. ‘Normally, when
you have a problem, if you can make from it a joke, you can, with ten words, say more than in a book. But nobody could imagine what was Hitler. Yes, Pharaoh and Haman had hate, too, but Hitler had
the technology of genocide.’ And little did Wiesenthal know that his mother and eighty-eight other relatives would vanish into Hitler’s boxcars, gas chambers, and ovens.

Implicit in this contemporary analysis of his own joke are two themes that recur in conversations with Wiesenthal. One is ‘humour as the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are
oppressed to smile at the situation that pains them.’ In the 1960s and 1970s, Wiesenthal published several volumes of Polish underground humour clandestinely in Poland, but under the pen-name
of ‘Mishka
Kukin’ – not just to protect his serious image in the West, he explained to me in 1976, but also ‘because ninety-five per cent of Polish
jokes in Poland are making fun of the government. I had to deal with communist authorities and they would be in trouble if they were giving information to someone who pokes fun at the regime. Even
though everybody knew “Kukin” was me, they could pretend not to know.’

His other theme stems from his half-century of experience with genocide – too much of it first-hand – in which he has discerned that ‘in the whole human history, whenever a
crime was committed against an innocent people, there were always the same six components:

‘
Hatred
is the juice on which those two monsters of human history, Hitler and Stalin, survived. In all countries of the world, most people want to live in peace. It is only the
extremism of their leaders that makes them hate and develops their hatred. None of my “clients” – not Eichmann, not Stangl, not Mengele, and not even Hitler or Stalin – was
born a criminal. Somebody had to teach them to hate: maybe the society, maybe the politics, maybe just a Jewish prostitute.

‘
Dictatorship
is the second component. What connects two thousand years of genocide? Too much power in too few hands. An emperor, a king; a pope, a bishop or archbishop; a
president, a general, a committee or a commission like the Spanish Inquisition that has the power in a dictatorship of hatred needs . . .

‘
Bureaucracy
: not just people sitting behind desks, but people who follow orders to kill people. The ones who operated gas chambers or guillotines or ran torture cellars: they
were bureaucrats who became murderers. The Germans of the 1940s had many of the same slogans as the Spanish inquisitors of the 1490s, and when the Russians took over from the Germans they used very
often the same wording for their decrees. Even the Nuremberg Laws of racial purity
¹¹
were nothing new; they were a Spanish invention. But the
Nazis only went back three generations while the Inquisition’s “Certificate of Good Blood” went back seven generations. No, my friend, Hitler invented
absolutely nothing, but what he had going for him was the . . .

‘Technology of our times, which gave him the possibility to fulfil the dream of thousands and thousands of haters for many, many centuries: a world without Jews. If the Inquisition five
hundred years ago had had the technology of Hitler, they would not have given Jews choices like “baptize or die!” or “baptize or go out of the country”. From the annals of
the Inquisition, I find that around 1485, they were looking for an inventor to make a machine that could kill seven people all at the same time. Believe me, if they’d had the technology they
wanted, no Jew would have survived in Spain, no Protestant in France, and maybe no Catholic in England.

‘A crisis or a war is the next component. In what other time is it easiest to kill innocent people? In a crisis, you need scapegoats and a diversion from your own problems. In a war, the
country is closed and, even in a democracy, you have secrecy. So there is no way for people to look, see, and ask questions.

‘A minority as victim is the last component. It can be a racial, social, or political minority that the dictators and their bureaucrats – those with power, hatred, and technology
– can hold responsible for a situation.’

Wiesenthal goes on to say that ‘when the Turks killed a million and a half Armenians almost a hundred years ago, those six components of genocide were there and they were there, too, when
the Spanish Inquisition put twenty people on a stake and burned them. And I can promise you that Hitler has studied very carefully both those holocausts.’

To Simon Wiesenthal today, hatred is the fuse which he fears will ignite the next world holocaust: ‘Technology without hatred
can be a blessing, though not always.
Technology
with
hatred is always a disaster. What will happen to this world when the haters of today, the terrorists, come into possession of the technology of our time?’

When Wiesenthal reads of disarmament negotiations in Geneva, Vienna, Washington, and Moscow, he wonders whether ‘it is more important to reduce weapons than to reduce hate. I am more
optimistic about their reducing weapons than about their reducing hate. Right now, we have the technology to kill each of us eight times. I like to think that, in my lifetime, the super-and
not-so-superpowers can get together and reduce it to four times. Then I might die more hopeful for my daughter and grandchildren.’

Wiesenthal, who would experience both Hitler and Stalin, says today that ‘the biggest difference between the two as criminals is that Hitler told the truth about what he
would do to Europe, what he would do to the Jews, but nobody believed him. Stalin lied about his genocide, about the gulag, and the world believed him, so he lasted longer and got to kill more
people than Hitler did.’

In 1934 and 1935, Wiesenthal apprenticed as a building engineer in Soviet Russia. He spent a few weeks in Kharkov and Kiev, but most of those two years in the Black Sea port of Odessa, which he
remembers as ‘a lovely city’ in the Ukraine ‘where I spent twenty-one months learning dictatorship from Stalin. When I saw what the Soviets did to their own people – arrests
right and left – this was for me not only very good preparation for the Nazis, but also what would happen if we ever came under Russian control.’ What disturbed him almost as much at
the time, however, was that ‘on the streets, all people looked alike: Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, even ethnic Germans. They wore the same clothes, they had the same faces set in the same
attitude, they seemed to have the same character: everything under Stalin was drab and uniform. When Hitler came, he would have a hard time figuring out which were the Jews and which were the other
“sub-humans”. I myself stood out in the crowd just by being me.’

Returning to Galicia at the end of his Russian apprenticeship, Wiesenthal was at last allowed to enter the Technical University of Lwów for the advanced degree that would allow him to
practise
architecture in Poland. For a while, he roomed on Janowskà Street: future site of the concentration camp in which he would live much of the war.
Geographically, it was an easy stroll to the Technical University on Sapiehy Street, which also housed Loncki Prison, a future Gestapo torture centre. Even then, Jewish students took the long way
around, bypassing Sapiehy Street, for its residents were Polish officers and officials, professionals and businessmen, whose sons comprised most of the student body of Lwów’s Technical
and Agricultural Universities. These ‘gilded youths’ would fasten razor blades to sticks as weapons with which to attack Jewish students and leave them bleeding on the pavement.

‘In the evening,’ Wiesenthal recalls, ‘it was dangerous to walk Sapiehy Street if you so much as looked Jewish, especially at times when the young National Democrats or Radical
Nationalists were turning their anti-Jewish slogans from theory into practice. And there was never a policeman in sight.’

What perplexed Wiesenthal was that ‘at a time when Hitler was on Poland’s frontiers, poised to annex Polish territory, these Polish “patriots” could think of only one
thing: the Jews and how much they hated them. In Germany, at that time, they were building new weapons factories, they were building strategic roads straight towards Poland, and they were calling
up thousands of Germans for military service. But the Polish parliament paid little notice to this menace: it had “more important” things to do – new regulations for kosher
butchering, for instance – which might make life more difficult for the Jews.’

The Technical University’s yellow and terracotta neo-classical main building stood behind a low stone wall with a high iron fence. Inside lay no sanctuary. In the upper hall were the
offices of Professor Derdacki, for whom Wiesenthal did his diploma work by designing a tuberculosis sanatorium, and Professor Bagierski, who corrected many of his essays. Both were notorious
anti-Semites. When Bagierski had to confer with a Jewish student, Wiesenthal remembers, ‘he seemed to lose his breath and stutter more than usual.’ In 1936, a roving band flung a Jewish
student over the ornate balustrade just outside the dean of architecture’s office.