Nazi Hunter (7 page)

Some wooden crates were brought in: one for each Jew to stand next to. Lined up facing a wall with arms crossed behind necks, they were shot one by one in the neck by a
Ukrainian executioner. After killing three or four men, he would go over to the table and help himself to a drink and some food while another Ukrainian reloaded the weapon. Two other Ukrainians
would shove each body into a crate and haul it away.

Seeing men he had known for years crumple, bleed, and die in seconds before his eyes, and knowing that their fate awaited him, too, Simon Wiesenthal realized that he was no longer a hostage to
the random, often drunken, violence of the Ukrainian cavalryman who had slashed his thigh as a boy in Buczacz, or the Polish fraternity men who lay in ambush for Jewish students outside the
Technical University. ‘What I saw for the first time,’ he told me, ‘was systematic extermination that had no motive except to kill every Jew, starting with the ones who looked the
most dangerous to Hitler. And done by people who took real pleasure in killing us.’

As the shots and shouts of the boisterous Ukrainians drew closer to Wiesenthal, he heard a new sound: church bells. The Ukrainians heard it, too. Good Orthodox Catholics all, they laid down
their arms for evening mass.

Wiesenthal and his friend had stood five or six bullets away from extinction. Reprieved overnight, they and eighteen other survivors were marched to two large cells where their belts and
shoelaces were taken from them. Suicide was forbidden; not for the last time would Wiesenthal learn that, under the Nazis, a Jew could not choose when to die.

During the night, as Simon dozed uneasily on the floor, a flashlight picked him out and a faintly familiar Ukrainian voice said in Polish: ‘Engineer Wiesenthal! What are you doing
here?’

‘Who are you?’ Simon asked the beam of light.

The man behind it was his former construction foreman, Bodnar, remembered by Wiesenthal as ‘a very good stonemason I tried to use on every building I built.’ Though Bodnar now wore
the arm-band of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, he was still loyal to his former employer.

‘I’ve got to get you out of here,’ he whispered. ‘You know what they’ll do tomorrow morning.’

Wiesenthal asked him to help his chess partner, too. Thinking aloud, Bodnar mused: ‘The important thing is to get you out of this
building, no matter what the
excuse.’ He decided to tell his Ukrainian bosses that he’d unmasked a couple of very important Soviet spies among the Jews in custody. ‘I’ll ask them whether to take you to
Sapiehy Street or Academy Street for further questioning,’ Bodnar told them. ‘Either way, once I get you out of this place, I can lose you.’ Sapiehy Street, where the Technical
University lay, also housed Loncki Prison, which the Gestapo was converting to a ‘research centre’: a Nazi euphemism for torture chamber. Academy Street meant the Ukrainian
commissar’s headquarters.

An hour later, both prisoners were dragged from the cell and mauled by their Ukrainian jailers for a decent interval – long enough for Wiesenthal to lose two front teeth – until
Bodnar shouted: ‘Enough! We need names and information from them
before
we kill them.’

On their way out, Bodnar tried to tiptoe past the courtyard where the execution squad, having prayed but not having put away their weapons, were still finishing their food and drink by
candlelight while celebrating their day’s accomplishments. They were oblivious to all, but had been joined by a German sergeant, who spotted Bodnar and his prisoners and asked where he was
taking them. Bodnar, who spoke no German, told Wiesenthal to answer.

In his best German, Simon told the sergeant: ‘This is a Ukrainian policeman. We are Jews. He should bring us to his commissar.’

The German sergeant, already a little drunk, slapped Bodnar’s face and said: ‘Then what are you standing around for? If this is what you people are like, then later we’ll all
have troubles. Report back to me as soon as you deliver them.’

‘Safely’ outside, Wiesenthal apologized to Bodnar for the abuse he’d caused him. Bodnar was more concerned, however, that now he had to account, verbally at least, for his two
prisoners.

They trudged through the silent streets of Lemberg, where there was now a curfew for Poles and an earlier one for Jews. Bodnar took them past the sentry at Ukrainian headquarters and deposited
them in the commissar’s office, which Wiesenthal and his friend proceeded to clean. When the commissar arrived that morning, he asked them what the hell they were doing there.

‘A German sergeant sent us over to clean your office,’ said Wiesenthal, ‘and it was too late for us to go home when we were finished.’

‘So go home,’ the Ukrainian said brusquely, though obviously pleased that he mattered so much to his German masters. Wiesenthal and his friends were home in
time for breakfast.

Now the revolving door whirled so fast it was coming unhinged. Three days later, Wiesenthal was netted in a round-up of able-bodied men for work details. He and a hundred
others were sent ‘to a storage ground where they broke us into small groups and had us move armour plates from one place to another. These plates were too heavy for us to lift, particularly
when we were being beaten by two German soldiers to encourage us. One of them was from Leipzig and he kept saying he’d known lazy Jews in Leipzig, too, and had settled their accounts. The
armour plates had very sharp edges that cut our hands, but the soldiers wouldn’t let us wash off the blood or put something on the wounds. We worked without a midday break while the two
soldiers took turns having lunch.

‘In the afternoon, they had us carry heavy oxygen bottles, some of them weighing ninety to a hundred ten kilograms (198 to 242 pounds) for a distance up to three hundred metres (985 feet).
We worked in pairs and, late that afternoon, one couple stood still for a while and were beaten by both the soldiers. One of the men fell and was kicked some more in the face. He lay on the ground
unconscious. His partner was sent to work in another group. When we went home in the evening, he was still lying there and we never saw him again. It was nine o’clock – an hour past
curfew for Jews – so they gave us passes to go home and report back there next day.’

His life, his career, his hours, days, and sometimes his nights were no longer his own. Then the Germans started building a ghetto with Jewish labour. Wiesenthal remembers this phase well:

‘First, they fenced off part of the old town . . . Next, they pulled out the cobblestones, turning the streets into a quagmire. That was part of the systematic method of creating sub-human
living conditions. On rainy days you couldn’t cross the street without wading in mud up to your ankles. It was impossible to clean oneself. We must have looked like animals, or phantoms from
a nether world. And on the worst days, SS leaders and army officers would arrive, with some women, in their big cars, and they would watch us and laugh and take photographs of the strange species
of sub-humans.
They sent these pictures home, and everyone said, “Look at those Jews! Hitler is right! They aren’t even human.’”

The Wiesenthals and his mother managed to stay out of the ghetto until late summer, when an SS man sauntered into their apartment with a Polish prostitute on his arm. Looking right through them,
the whore sized up their flat and said, ‘Yes, it’ll do.’ An hour later, the Wiesenthals went to the ghetto, leaving all their heirlooms behind. The new mistress of the house
wanted to take it furnished.

A little more than a month later, on 21 October 1941, the SS held a ‘registration’. Simon Wiesenthal had learned the new meaning of the word: ‘The more often they registered
us, the fewer we became. In SS language, registering was not a mere stocktaking. It meant much more . . . From bitter personal experience, we mistrusted words whose natural meaning seemed harmless.
The Germans’ intentions toward us had never been harmless.’

Simon and Cyla were sent to Janowskà, a concentration camp the Germans were developing in the sands and woods of Lemberg’s western city limit. His mother was permitted to remain in
their seven square metres (eight and a half square yards) of ghetto squalor. At their hasty parting, Simon gave her ‘the last of what we had: a gold watch’ in case she needed to buy her
safety.

The gateways to hell were segregated by sex. Loaded on to separate trucks and herded by Ukrainians and Askaris (Soviet prisoners of war who’d gone over to the German SS), Simon and Cyla
were driven to the men’s and women’s camps of Janowskà. In each case, the vestibule was a shack where a pair of German officers ordered the prisoners to give up the few
belongings they’d brought with them and state their names, ages, and work qualifications. Then, after cursory physical examinations, they were sent through the back door into Hades.

Each prisoner’s bread ration was three ounces per day. At the end of a hard day’s labour enlarging the camp, quarrying stone, digging burial pits for the day’s dead, or (when
there was no work to be done) breaking ground and then restoring it or carrying heavy stones from here to there and then back again, the men would stand evening inspection – and those who
were visibly sick would be barred from the barracks ‘to prevent infection of the healthy’. Instead, they would spend the night out in the cold taking what the Germans called ‘a
fresh-air cure’. After eight at night, there was a
curfew, and the Askaris on the watch-towers had orders to shoot anyone who stood or moved, so the condemned men had to
lie on the frozen ground all night. In the Galician winter, none of them arose in the morning, for the ‘fresh-air cure’ was fatal. Some, however, took a short-cut to oblivion by
standing up in the night and inviting the Askaris to shoot them. The Askaris always obliged.

In Janowskà’s early days, escape attempts proliferated even when the number of captives executed for each try was doubled from five to ten. The first successful escape meant
twenty-five camp killings plus even more drastic consequences: a truck drew up to the man’s home in the ghetto and took his entire family – plus some visitors who had dropped by –
to the camp as hostages awaiting his return. They were placed in solitary confinement without light or food. Their ordeal lasted three days – until the remorse-stricken escapee returned and
was beaten to death before the eyes of his family and their friends, who were then released. The next time a man escaped, the procedure was repeated. After three days, when he hadn’t turned
himself in, his mother, sister, niece, sister-in-law, and a neighbour’s child were shot to death. After that, escape attempts were few.

Toward the end of 1941, by coincidence, Simon and Cyla Wiesenthal were both transferred to a special forced labour camp near the Lemberg railyards. A satellite of
Janowskà, it lodged prisoners serving the Eastern Railroad Repair Works. Cyla was sent to the locomotive workshop to polish brass and nickel. For a while, she saw Simon daily, for he was put
to work painting swastikas on captured Russian locomotives. When he was promoted to sign-painter for the entire Eastern Works, she saw less of him, but his new job won him a mobility that would
later save their lives.

Wiesenthal’s work – and the man himself – caught the eye of the Eastern Works’ head railwayman, Heinrich Günthert, a civilian, ‘because he always walked with
his head up and looked me straight in the eye.’ Günthert subsequently told Wiesenthal’s postwar Boswell, the late Joseph Wechsberg: ‘The SS men said that Wiesenthal was
impertinent. I didn’t argue with them, but I admit that I was impressed by the man’s erect bearing. He had a thoughtful expression in his eyes, as though he knew that we Germans might
one day have to account for all this.’ With God on leave and His anointed deputy, Pope Pius XII, strangely silent, it seemed as if
Simon, little thinking he would ever
survive the war, had already stepped into the shoes of Deputy for the Dead.

Upon learning that Wiesenthal was a licensed architect, Günthert – a Nazi who’d already had trouble with the SS guards for treating his Jewish labourers humanely – gave
him work as a technician and draughtsman. Günthert’s deputy, Adolf Kohlrautz, also a Nazi, not only shared his chief’s attitudes, but was immensely grateful for the praise and
promotions that came his way thanks to Simon’s technical drawings, which were submitted under Kohlrautz’s name. Kohlrautz would tell Simon the news he’d risked his neck to hear
over the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and smuggle food to Simon’s mother in the ghetto.

The ghetto, not the Janowskà camp, felt die first wave of organized deportations to unknown destinations; in Janowskà, you generally finished your life there, sooner or later.
Those ‘privileged’ to remain in the ghetto were mothers and children as well as older people. The more able-bodied among them, however, were forced to labour outside the ghetto by day,
during which SS body-snatchers would raid the compound to relieve it of ‘non-working, useless mouths’. A woman might return home from a hard day’s slavery to find her children
gone forever. After desperate mothers managed to conceal their children in stoves and closets or behind false walls, the SS police chief of Lemberg, Friedrich Katzmann, tried another tactic. He
announced a relaxation of discipline and, as a token of good faith, he opened a kindergarten for ghetto children. It offered extra rations of milk and cocoa.

The mothers watched warily, but first their hungry children and then their own aspirations for the next generation got the better of them. One afternoon, however, the kindergarten was closed
forever. Three SS trucks had taken the class on an outing from which it would never return.

Next to be weeded out as ‘useless’ were ageing women. Working in the railway yards in the summer of 1942, Simon Wiesenthal watched helplessly as the SS crammed elderly Jewish women
into a freight train – one hundred to the car – and then let it stand for three days in the blazing sun while the women begged for water. Hearing their cries, he could only pray that
his mother was not among them, but God was on leave and Rosa Wiesenthal was aboard that train.