Nazi Hunter (84 page)

‘Are you sounding this as a warning?’ I asked.

‘I’m not saying it as a warning or anything of the sort. I’m saying facts. I would imagine that if Mr Waldheim announced he were running for President again, inevitably the
whole thing will revive. The World Jewish Congress would have to revive it, appropriately.’

After formal thanks by Karl Vak, chief of Vienna’s Central Savings Bank, Hertzberg said: ‘May I have one more word, Dr Vak? . . . I am going to speak officially. This is not a
personal statement. I am talking with the full concurrence of my colleagues in the World Jewish Congress . . . We’ve said everything we’re going to say in the matter of Waldheim. His
future is a matter for the Austrian people to decide. We of the World Jewish Congress trust the good sense of the Austrian people. Or, to put it another way, Waldheim will neither live politically
or cease to live politically from campaigning against the World Jewish Congress. That is over. Can I make myself clearer than that? The problem of Waldheim is the problem of Austria. It is no
longer the problem of the World Jewish Congress. We have spoken our last word on the subject.’

Chatting with Hertzberg afterwards, I reminded him how he’d hailed Israel Singer as a sprout he’d nurtured. ‘Yes,’ the rabbi
responded, ‘but
you know “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”
⁸⁶
– and [it applies to] Elan Steinberg more than him.’

Of Waldheim, Hertzberg remarked: ‘This man who didn’t tell the truth about his past has been making some noises about running again . . . We are not going to provide him a target.
He’s not going to run against the World Jewish Congress. He’s not going to run against
Weltjudentum
[world Jewry], thus allowing all the latent xenophobic feelings in this
country to well up around supporting him. That game is not going to be played again. We are leaving him to the embarrassment – or to the support – of the Austrians. So he’s not
going to have such an easy time of it. The Austrians are embarrassed, but I hear he’s living in a world of unreality. He thinks he’s going to run.’

Later, I called the Austrian President’s office, where his aide, Dr Scheide sounded pleased by the WJC’s provisional withdrawal from the Austrian battlefield but said Waldheim had
not yet decided whether to run for re-election and would make no comment on Hertzberg’s words.

The next morning, I rang up Simon Wiesenthal, who remarked that he was ‘glad to hear that a man of Rabbi Hertzberg’s stature shares my opinion of Singer and Steinberg and says that
the whole matter was badly run. I myself have suffered from this, so I am happy if it’s over.’

When I asked Simon whether a Waldheim candidacy in 1992 might re-ignite the flames of controversy, he replied:

‘He cannot run alone. No party will nominate him now. For him it is possible only to run around the table.’

In 1991, President Waldheim announced that he would not run for a second term in 1992 at the age of seventy-three.

All too often in this part of the world, fear of one lie gives birth to another lie, in the foolish hope that by protecting ourselves from the first lie we will be
protected from lies in general. But a lie can never protect us from a lie. Those who falsify history do not protect the freedom of a nation but rather constitute a threat to it.

The idea that a person can rewrite his autobiography is one of the traditional self-deceptions of Central Europe. Trying to do that means hurting oneself and one’s fellow countrymen.
When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.

– Czech (then Czechoslovak) President Václav Havel at the opening of the Salzburg Festival in Austria after he was introduced by President Kurt Waldheim on 26 July
1990 (translated from the Czech by Ká
č
a Polá
č
ková-Henley).

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No Nobel for Simon Wiesenthal makes him no less noble. Rabbi Hier of the Wiesenthal Centre puts it most eloquently:

‘Simon, to his credit, doesn’t have to apologize to anyone for what he’s done with his life. Without Simon Wiesenthal, the subject of the Holocaust would not really receive
serious attention anywhere in the world. Let’s also state for the record that, although the popular writers on the Holocaust began writing in the sixties – that’s when Elie Wiesel
first started getting published, too – there was still a big period of time between 1945 and the early sixties: a crucial period when there was the greatest pressure to forget. But if there
was one person who kept it alive, that was Simon Wiesenthal. So this is all to his credit that nobody can take away from him. Without him, all this that we’re talking about in America, the
mere fact that there would be in Washington a President’s Council, a Commission on the Holocaust headed by Elie Wiesel, would have been an impossibility, because the subject would have been
forgotten. Simon was a stubborn man who kept it alive through the worst of times.’

When Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, Simon Wiesenthal did not rejoice at this recognition of Holocaust remembrance, for no love has been lost between these two titans of
survivorship. Though Wiesel once came to Wiesenthal’s rescue as a fund-raiser when his Viennese bank collapsed in 1974, Simon says that Wiesel later opposed his poaching on his turf when the
Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies was built in Los Angeles three years later. One bone of contention was Simon’s insistence that the Wiesenthal Centre, despite being a division of
Yeshiva University, should take a non-sectarian approach to the Holocaust:

‘I was for over four years in different camps with people from fifteen nations: Jews, Gentiles, gypsies, communists. Through this experience, my view on the
Holocaust and the whole problem of Nazism is a lot different from Elie Wiesel, who was
only
six months in camps and only with Jews. For me was the Holocaust not only a Jewish tragedy, but
also a human tragedy. After the war, when I saw that the Jews were talking only about the tragedy of six million Jews, I sent letters to Jewish organizations asking them to talk also about the
millions of others who were persecuted with us together – many of them only because they helped Jews. This made me unpopular with Jewish organizations – and, when the Wiesenthal Centre
happened, I became a danger to them. Elie Wiesel wrote that what I was doing was “a diminution” of the tragedy. But he and they are the diminishers, for it is they who reduced the whole
tragedy to a problem between Nazis and Jews instead of a crime against humanity.

‘I know I am not only the bad conscience of the Nazis. I am also the bad conscience of the Jews. Because what I have taken up as my duty was
everybody’s
duty.’

Relations between Wiesenthal and Wiesel soured not from their rivalry so much as from their disagreement over recognizing the role of gypsies as victims of Nazi genocide. ‘Half a million
gypsies are not the same to the world as six million Jews,’ Simon acknowledges, ‘even though the proportion is at least the same. But gypsies weren’t well-organized people; they
moved from place to place and many were illiterate. Besides, there was no Gypsy Documentation Centre – so nobody much cared about them until 1954.’

That was when Wiesenthal, on a research visit to Prague, stumbled on to some 1939 papers left by the Gestapo in the Moravian city of Ostrava. Piecing them together over the years like a jigsaw
puzzle, Wiesenthal had established the chain of command in the extermination of the gypsies: with Adolf Eichmann at the top and a Captain Walter Braune, who has never been found, directly in charge
of gypsy deportations to Poland which began in the fall of 1939. After more than a decade, Simon presented his findings to the Central Prosecutor’s Office in Ludwigsburg, Germany. Later, he
learned that other documents pertaining to the classification of gypsies under the Nuremberg laws of racial purity were in an archive at the
University of Tübingen under
the care of Professor Sophie Erhard, the same ‘race hygienist’ who had drawn some of them up in 1942. A telegram from Wiesenthal to the German Minister of Justice was all it took to
have the records transferred to the Federal Archives in Koblenz.

When four hard-working gypsy families in Darmstadt returned from a three-week vacation to find that their home – where they had lived for four years – had been torn down on the
assumption they wouldn’t be coming back, and besides, the authorities claimed, their living conditions posed a health menace, the Central Council of German Gypsies protested to the Mayor of
Darmstadt that this was a ‘continuation’ of Nazi persecution. The mayor sued the gypsies for slander – and Simon Wiesenthal went to court in Frankfurt to testify ‘on behalf
of my fellow sub-humans’ that this was indeed the ‘same genocide, just new pogroms; the tragedy of the gypsies in Germany is by no means over.’ The mayor’s law suit was
dismissed, but, says Simon, ‘the gypsies got no restitution. The City can get away with murder.’

In 1979, a US Holocaust Memorial Council was founded to perpetuate awareness of history’s greatest tragedy. Simon Wiesenthal, as an interested observer, was appalled to find that ‘in
addition to Jewish representatives, there are Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and others who have seats and voices on the fifty-five-person council – but not the gypsies.’ Hoping to win
the gypsies a seat, Wiesenthal wrote a letter of polite protest to the council’s chairman, ‘my “friend” Wiesel’.

Many months later, Simon received a reply from a secretary stating that the selection of council members was in President Ronald Reagan’s hands. On Wiesenthal’s advice, gypsy leaders
sent pleas to the White House, but their mail was forwarded to Elie Wiesel, who, says Simon, showed no sympathy.

Simon then wrote to Wiesel suggesting that one of the thirty-odd Jewish council members should vacate his seat and give it to a gypsy. Simon received no reply, but when he published his appeal
in his 1985 annual report, he pricked enough Jewish consciences that Wiesel had to react to the criticism. The council held what Wiesenthal calls ‘a kind of memorial hour’ for the
gypsies in September 1986, but Simon says that ‘not until Elie Wiesel gave up the chairmanship a few months later were we able to get a gypsy on
the council.’ In
1987, Professor Ian F. Hancock, President of the World Romany Congress, was named to a vacant seat.

Simon’s crusade for the gypsies posed a dilemma for him which he relates quite candidly in his 1988 memoir: when Wiesel won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, gypsy organizations wanted to go to
Oslo to stage a demonstration against him. Wiesenthal pleaded with Roman Rose, president of the Central Council of German Gypsies, to call it off because, as a rival who had been considered for the
prize, Wiesenthal would have been accused of inciting the protest to spite Wiesel. Out of long friendship and respect for his loyalty, the gypsies acceded.

In 1985, a happenstance of history had the World Jewish Congress holding its annual meeting in the convention centre of Vienna’s Hofburg (at the other end of which palace President
Waldheim would take up office a year later) at the very time when Austrian Minister of Defence Friedhelm Frischenschlager was extending a handshake of welcome to returning war criminal Walter
Reder, the massacrist of Marzabotto. While the Congress wrestled with whether to pull out of Vienna and controversy swirled through the Hofburg with Chancellor Sinowatz trying to placate WJC
President Bronfman, I saw Wiesenthal and Wiesel stalk a stately minuet of snubbing each other around the gefilte fish at a kosher buffet in the grand ballroom. It was not an appetizing
spectacle.

No love has been lost between Wiesenthal and Wiesel since then. As late as 1989, Simon would tell me bitterly about Wiesel: ‘That man, how he hates me!’ For the only time I can
remember, Simon failed to add his usual disclaimer: ‘But I am not a hater.’

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