Nazi Hunter (6 page)

In 1937, while Wiesenthal was still formalizing his degree, the Polish Radicals proclaimed their provisional utopia: a ‘Day without Jews’, usually during examination periods, as a
way to reduce the
already tiny number of Jewish students. Though beribboned fraternity brothers lay in ambush with spiked clubs, the faculty wouldn’t grant make-up
exams, so the Jews ran their gauntlet. On the ‘Day without Jews’, ambulances waited just outside the campus, which was off limits to the Polish police.

Poland wouldn’t mobilize against her real enemies until 31 August 1939, the day before Germany invaded. The country’s cavalry, booted and spurred, rode into gallant but hopeless
action against Hitler’s tanks and dive-bombers. So much for ‘Polish romanticism’, which Szymon Wiesenthal experienced at the cutting edge. ‘Where are they now, these
super-patriots who dreamed of a “Poland without Jews”?’ he would ask. ‘Perhaps the day when there would be no more Jews was not far off and their dream would be realized.
Only there wouldn’t be a Poland either!’

In 1936, soon after his return from Odessa, Szymon and Cyla had married, though the threat of Hitler was enough for the couple, both nearing thirty, to defer bringing a child
into their perilous world. Yet, even before he had his Polish diploma in hand, Szymon Wiesenthal was confident enough to open an architectural office in Lwów. He specialized in elegant
villas, which wealthy Polish Jews and Gentiles were still building without even trying to read Hitler’s handwriting on their walls. ‘Right to the end,’ says Wiesenthal,
‘people surrounded themselves with possessions. They must have thought that somehow property would protect them. Maybe, in those days, I thought that way, too.’

While many architects in Lwów favoured façade over function, Wiesenthal’s thinking fell somewhere between the philosophies of two Viennese architectural pioneers: Adolf
Loos’s ‘ornament is crime’ and Otto Wagner’s more reticent view that function can be ornamental. To Wiesenthal, ‘when you start from the outside, eventually you have
to cripple function to fit façade. But when the function works, the façade will be absolutely right.’ The Wagner-Loos influence is just one reason why Simon takes particular
pride in the day in 1990 when, decked out like a Medici cardinal, he received an honorary Doctorate of Architecture from the University of Vienna.

* * *

So far as Simon Wiesenthal knows, none of the housing he built in Galicia still stands. The two houses he remembers most fondly are the first and the last.
Toward the start of his career in 1936, he built a rustic villa in Dolina for his mother and stepfather. His final commission came in early 1939 from ‘a very rich man, a
nouveau
riche
Jewish man, who said to me when I asked what kind of programme he had for his house: “I buy this piece of land. I wish to make a house. You want to know my programme? I have many
enemies. So my programme is that when my enemies see this house, they should die of envy.’”

Wiesenthal put everything he had into this job, which he finished just before 23 August 1939, when Hitler and Stalin signed a ‘non-aggression’ pact partitioning Poland between them
with secret provisions for incorporating the independent Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the Soviet Union the following year. World War II began a week later when Germany
invaded Poland from the west shortly before Russia invaded from the east. When the Red Army occupied Dolina, it paid the thirty-year-old architect a dubious tribute by picking ‘the best house
in town’ for its regional commander’s residence and evicting Simon’s elders.

In late September, after the Red Army had conquered Galicia, plainclothesmen from the NKVD, the Soviet security police, rounded up Jewish ‘bourgeois’ merchants and industrialists,
including Simon’s stepfather, who died in a Soviet prison. Simon’s mother came to five with him and Cyla in Lwów, which was now called Lvov in Russian. Though Daylight Saving
Time hadn’t come to Europe yet, the Galicians got it first, for they had to set their clocks ahead two hours to conform to Moscow time.

In Lvov, Wiesenthal’s
nouveau riche
client’s enemies were envious, all right, so they denounced the man as a capitalist to the Russians, who could see the truth of it with
their own eyes. Deported to Siberia, he never came back – and it could be said that, thanks to the house that Wiesenthal built for him, it was the client who died of envy.

Four weeks after Lwów became Lvov, everybody had to register for a new passport: ‘valid five years and renewable thereafter’, they were told optimistically.
Anyone who declared himself a merchant or property-owner, however, was deported to Siberia. Jewish
intellectuals – including doctors, lawyers, and teachers – had
the designation ‘§11’ stamped on their passports, marking them as second-class citizens banned from living in large cities or anywhere within a hundred kilometres (sixty-two miles)
of the border. A few months later, all holders of Paragraph 11 passports were deported to Siberia as security risks. Not too many survived the war.

Later, Wiesenthal would observe that one difference between Soviet and Nazi genocide was that the Russians liquidated the capitalists first and then the intelligentsia, but the Nazis did it the
other way round in order to learn and master the Jewish businesses they took over. With his clientele depleted and materials pillaged by the Red Army, Szymon survived in Soviet Lvov not as an
architect, but as a mechanic in a bed-springs factory. By bribing an NKVD commissar, he was able to obtain normal passports for his wife, his mother and himself.

In Lvov, all businesses and houses were nationalized; an occasional homeowner was allowed to stay on as superintendent of his former property – with tenants chosen by the government. No
visitor was allowed to stay overnight without permission from the nearest militia post, which made frequent middle-of-the-night spot checks.

Next in the Sovietization process came shortages. Waiting in line for a loaf of bread took two to three hours; for a kilo (2.2 pounds) of sugar, four to five hours. A new industry arose:
line-standing. One could hire a professional line-stander for several times the price of the goods. This, in turn, spawned a thriving black market selling sugar for twenty-five times the official
price.

With Russian soldiers and officials sometimes buying out everything in a store and promising to pay later, and with their women buying nightgowns and wearing them as evening dresses . . . with
jail sentences for coming late to work and constant parades and mandatory free elections to participate in, the people of Lvov accepted their latest ‘Liberation’ with resignation and
almost relief. ‘It was not as grim as some of the others,’ Wiesenthal concedes, deflecting the pain with a Czech riddle about what would happen if the Soviets had fulfilled their dream
of African expansion and taken over the Sahara.

Wiesenthal’s answer: ‘For two years, nothing would happen – and then they would have to import sand.’

By mid-1940, the arrests and midnight raids had ceased – and
enough normalcy had returned that it was safe for Szymon’s design for a sanatorium finally to be
accepted by Professor Derdacki. ‘With generally satisfactory grades’ on his tests, Wiesenthal was granted a diploma on 25 June and licensed as an architectural engineer. He gave up his
job of twisting bed-springs to take a clerical post in a construction company which had little or nothing to erect. But an agricultural co-operative near Odessa needed outbuildings for
feather-plucking, so Szymon returned twice to the city of his apprenticeship and worked his way up to chief engineer of the firm.

‘I could still be happy designing huts for chicken feathers,’ he remembers, ‘because, back in Lvov, my work as an architect still stood – though the people I built for
were gone. No matter how primitive they are, Russian people – even occupying soldiers – have great respect for property because they don’t have any of their own. But when the
Germans came in 1941, I saw my houses demolished in seconds – and, with this, my world was already destroyed.’

3

When Polish
Lwów
became Soviet Lvov in 1939, the inhabitants found themselves in a vestibule of hell with a revolving door to the nether world, but at least a
little hope of redemption. True, Simon’s stepfather passed through the revolving door to perish in Siberia. True, Simon went in an architect and came out a mechanic in a bed-springs factory;
by 1940, however, he was working his way back up the ladder from a new bottom with the resilience which people in his part of the world have always needed just to survive. But a few weeks after
he’d built all the chicken-feather huts that were wanted in Odessa and returned home to Lvov to seek new opportunities, the steel door to the outside world was bolted shut on 22 June 1941,
when Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union.

Eight days later, when the Red Army left Lvov to regroup in the east, the city reverted overnight to its old Austrian name of
Lemberg
. But the first German invaders had more familiar
faces, for they were the hated Ukrainians: auxiliary troops who had fled the Soviet side of a partitioned Poland for the German side and had been trained there. They celebrated their return with a
pogrom that lasted three days and three nights. Any Jewish male they laid hands on was offered a choice of deaths: hanging, shooting, or beating. Others were trampled to death or crushed beneath
the wheels of cannons. When the pogrom was over, 6000 Jews were dead.

On the heels of the Ukrainians came the
Einsatzgruppen
, SS ‘Special Action Groups’ which entered behind Hitler’s conquering armies and whose only combat mission was to
destroy civilian ‘enemies’, starting with Jewish intellectuals, communists, and gypsies. First unleashed in Austria and Czechoslovakia, they were the brutal
fist
that hammered home Hitler’s furious words to an incredulous world.

‘On the first of July,’ Simon recalls, ‘I was in the apartment of a friend, around eleven in the morning, when we heard a loud screaming in the street. We went to the window
and saw German soldiers and Ukrainian civilians insulting Jews in the street, dragging Jews from their homes, undressing and beating them. Two civilians and a soldier were beating six Jews with
sticks. Near the curb, a boy of twelve or thirteen had been knocked down by a soldier, who was now kicking him in the head with his army boot. A few yards away, two women were lying on the ground;
their hair had been pulled out and it was lying beside them.

‘A few minutes later, a group of about sixty unsuspecting Jews wandered into this scene from a side street and were greeted with sticks and stones by the Ukrainians and beaten with rifle
butts by the Germans. But suddenly the beatings stopped. An open car – I think it was a Mercedes – arrived with a German general wearing gold braid on his shoulders. He was standing up
in the car and a cameraman was filming him. The soldiers all stood at attention and gave him a military salute. The people they were beating had to stand up straight and give a
Heil Hitler
salute. The general waved and, when the car pulled away, the beatings resumed.’

Wiesenthal stayed out of sight during the pogrom and was playing chess in the cellar of his house with a friend on Sunday afternoon, 6 July 1941, when a Yiddish-speaking Ukrainian policeman
barged ‘right through the front door and went downstairs to tell us to come with him,’ Wiesenthal recalls. ‘We were on a list he had and he made it sound like we should be
honoured.’

The two chess players were taken to Brigidki Prison. In a courtyard, some forty other Jewish professional men were standing around: lawyers, doctors, engineers, and teachers. Wiesenthal and his
friend were invited to join them. ‘Later,’ says Simon dryly, ‘they would throw the same sort of garden party for the Polish intelligentsia of Lwów’ – mostly
university professors plus one of Poland’s best-known writers, Tadeusz Boy-
Ẑ
elénski.

The centrepiece of the courtyard was a table covered with bottles of vodka, sausages, plates of hors d’oeuvres, and bullets. For their crimes of being Jewish and educated, the guests would
partake only of ammunition.