Nazi Hunter (8 page)

‘My mother was in August 1942 taken by a Ukrainian policeman,’ Simon says, lapsing swiftly into the present tense as immediacy takes hold. ‘She gives him
my gold watch and he says OK and goes away. An hour later, he comes back and this time she has nothing to give him, so she is gone. A neighbour told me this.’ Dragged from the ghetto, Rosa
Wiesenthal was put aboard a truck that took her and two dozen others to the freight cars waiting in the yards. They all perished in Belzec, a new extermination camp on the road from Lemberg to
Lublin. Rosa Wiesenthal was sixty-three.

Around the same time, Cyla Wiesenthal learned that, back in Buczacz, her mother had been shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman as she was being evicted from her home. ‘She wasn’t
moving quick enough,’ says Simon, ‘so he shot her on the steps of her own house.’ In all, the Wiesenthals lost eighty-nine relatives to the Second World War – and it is for
them, among millions of others, that Simon stands deputy.

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Imprisoned in the Janowskà concentration camp, where brutality and torture reigned, Simon Wiesenthal was often put on work details outside the camp – which should
have been a relief, but wasn’t. Marched through the streets of his city, he could read on the faces of passers-by – even, in one encounter, an ex-classmate’s – that he was
in a parade of the legion of the dead, with each marcher carrying around his own death certificate from which only the date was missing. A year earlier, in the squalor of the ghetto, where each Jew
was allotted two square metres (less than two and a half square yards) of living space, a friend of Simon’s had overheard an old woman’s answer to how God could allow such suffering.
She said simply: ‘God is on leave.’

At such times, Wiesenthal was convinced the world had conspired to accept, without protest or compassion, the fate Hitler had decreed for the Jews. Having lived among Poles from birth, grown up
with them, and attended their schools, Simon knew that ‘to them we were always foreigners. Mutual understanding was out of the question. And even now that the Poles, too, had been enslaved
and were next on Hitler’s list for extermination, nothing had changed: there were still barriers between us.’ Sometimes, this estrangement grew so strong that Simon ‘no longer
even wanted to look at Poles. In spite of the conditions and the risks inside the camp, I would have preferred to stay there. But I didn’t always have the choice.’

On an October morning that would mark him for the rest of his life, Simon Wiesenthal’s work detail was herded past passive Polish faces on Janowskà Street, left on to Sapiehy
Street, and then right into the Technical University, where he had earned his engineering diploma in architecture; his alma mater was now a military hospital
for German troops
wounded on the Russian front. Before the prisoners could be put to work emptying round-the-clock rubbish from busy operating rooms, a nurse accosted Wiesenthal with ‘Are you a Jew?’

The answer was so obvious that Simon didn’t respond. Satisfied by his silence, the nurse said ‘Come with me’ and led him inside the main building and up the stairs into, of all
places, what used to be the dean of architecture’s office, where Wiesenthal had handed in his assignments in happier times. Now a sick-room, it was the death chamber of a mortally wounded
twenty-one-year-old SS soldier from Stuttgart who had asked not for a priest, but for a Jew to hear his confession.

In the Ukrainian city of Dnyepropetrovsk before he was hurt, the young SS man had participated in a round-up of some 400 Jews, who were packed into a house that was then incinerated. Acting on
orders, his unit had gunned down victims leaping from the flaming building. Now, blinded by a bombshell in the siege of Taganrog weeks later, he still had before his eyes a vision of a family that
had perished in the Dnyepropetrovsk massacre: a father, his clothes afire, shielded his son’s eyes before leaping with the child in his arms. The mother jumped a moment later. ‘Perhaps
they were already dead when they hit the pavement,’ the dying SS man said to Wiesenthal. ‘It was frightful. Screams mixed with volleys of shots probably intended to drown the shrieks. I
can never forget – it haunts me.’

Despite additional brandy rations, many of the young SS men in his unit hadn’t slept well that night. Their platoon leader rebuked them next morning: ‘You and your sensitive
feelings. Men, you cannot go on like this. This is war! One must be hard! They are not our people. The Jew is not a human being! The Jews are the cause of all our misfortunes! And when you shoot
one of them, it is not the same thing as shooting one of us: it doesn’t matter whether it is man, woman, or child. They are different from us.’ But one SS man, at least, could no longer
believe these words he’d heard half his life.

In the battle of Taganrog, when he and his comrades left the trenches to storm a Russian position, this one man suddenly stood rooted to the ground. His hands, holding his rifle with fixed
bayonet, quivered. For, before him on the battlefield, he saw the burning family – the father with the child and behind them the mother –
coming towards him. The
thought,
‘No, I can’t shoot at them a second time!’
crossed his mind as a shell exploded in his face.

What the dying man wanted now was absolution to be given by the anonymous Jew brought before him. He told Wiesenthal: ‘I have longed to talk about it to a Jew and beg forgiveness from him.
Only I didn’t know whether there were any Jews left. I know what I am asking is almost too much for you, but without your answer I cannot die in peace.’

Left alone with the young German, Wiesenthal had time to reflect that true repentance had brought together a dying ‘murderer who didn’t want to be a murderer, but had been made into
one by a murderous ideology’ with a Jew doomed to die at the hands of these same murderers, but resisting death because he ‘yearned to see the end of all the horror that blighted the
world.’ And he knew that he ‘was not yet ready to be touched by the hand of death.’

As the SS man’s hand groped for his, Simon held it out of reach and sat in the shadow of death contemplating bright sunlight outside and almost envying the dying murderer the traditional
sunflower that would soon decorate his grave ‘to connect him with the living world. Butterflies will visit . . . For me there will be no sunflower. I’ll be buried in a mass grave, with
corpses piled on top of me. No sunflower will ever light my darkness and no butterflies will ever dance on my terrible tomb.’

Words gave way to silence as the dying man’s confession petered out with a plea that it not go unanswered.

Having heard him out, Wiesenthal left the room without speaking a word. The SS man died a few hours later.

Back in Janowskà that night, Wiesenthal told a handful of his fellow inmates what had happened to him. One of them exclaimed: ‘One less!’ and another said,
‘So you saw a murderer dying? I would like to see that ten times a day.’

A more thoughtful companion named Josek remarked: ‘When you started telling us, I feared at first that you had really forgiven him. You would have had no right to do this in the name of
people who hadn’t authorized you to do so. What people have done to you yourself, you can, if you like, forgive and forget. That is your own affair. But it would have been a terrible sin to
burden your conscience with other people’s sufferings.’

This terrible burden, however, would prove to be Wiesenthal’s vocation for more than four postwar decades. Nor would he let go of the moral issue he faced at the
death-bed of a man who wished to die in peace, but couldn’t because his terrible crime gave him no rest.

The Talmud had taught Wiesenthal that, even on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, one cannot be cleansed of one’s sins against other mortals through sincere repentance alone. One must first
obtain the forgiveness of those one has wronged before asking divine mercy. Even God Himself can only forgive sins committed against Himself, not against man – and certainly not against
mankind!

In the New Testament, too, the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew VI: 9–13) asks forgiveness not just for our trespasses, but for those who trespass against us and, earlier in the Book of
Matthew (V:23), Jesus says: ‘If thou bring thine offering to the altar and thou remember there that thy brother has aught against thee, leave thy offering there before the altar, and go,
first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and bring thine offering.’

Only God, still on leave, might have known how many priestly confessors as well as postwar courts would grant absolution to Nazi mass murderers who expressed guilt or did minor penance for sins
that surpassed all biblical reckoning.

Two and a half years later, in the death barracks of the concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria, Simon broached his dilemma to a bunkmate named Bolek, a Polish Catholic who had been studying
for the priesthood in Warsaw when the Germans shipped him to Auschwitz. Simon’s summary concluded with a barrage of questions: ‘What do you think I should have done? Should I have
forgiven him? Did I have any right to forgive him? What does your religion say? What would you have done in my position?’

After some thought, Bolek replied: ‘I don’t think the attitude of the great religions to the question of forgiveness differs to any great extent. If there is any difference, then
it’s more in practice than in principle. One thing is certain: you can only forgive a wrong that has been done to yourself. Yet, on the other hand: where would the SS man turn? None of those
he’d wronged were still alive.’

‘So he asked something from me that was impossible to give?’ Simon asked hopefully.

‘Probably he turned to you because he regarded Jews as a single condemned community,’ Bolek surmised, going on to conclude
that since he ‘showed signs of
repentance, genuine, sincere repentance for his misdeeds . . . then he deserved the mercy of forgiveness from you.’

They argued this point from then until parting – a few days after liberation on 5 May 1945, when Bolek headed home to Poland and
his
God. The more they talked, says Simon, the
more ‘Bolek began to falter in his original opinion . . . and for my part I became less and less certain that I had acted properly.’

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