Nazi Hunter (86 page)

Now Wiesenthal interrupted her with a hypothetical question about innocent bystanders caught in a shoot-out between cops and the robbers they’re chasing: ‘Who is responsible? The
police or the killers?’

‘If there is an invading army in another country . . .’ Rime reiterated, but then she shifted gear. ‘OK, let’s forget about Lebanon. Let’s go back to 1948 in Deir
Yassin. That was a massacre, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Wiesenthal conceded. In April 1948, two Jewish terrorist organizations – Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) and the Stern Gang, to which Menachem Begin
and his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, once belonged – combined operations to storm the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin and killed some 250 inhabitants.

‘Then what do you say about it?’ Rime asked. ‘I understand totally why you are looking for justice. You have every right to do this. But we must also look at other things. You
say we should never be as good at killing as the Nazis . . .’

‘You know,’ said Wiesenthal, ‘I have heard about Deir Yassin and I had talks, not only with Begin, but with other people. They say they had warned the people before and asked
them to leave before someone would be shot. And these people, they say, ignored the warning.’

‘Would you leave,’ Rime wanted to know, ‘if somebody comes around and says “if you don’t go out by tomorrow, we’re going to shoot you”? We’re
talking about a whole town, a little city of 250 people. And I’m talking about principles. I’m not accusing anybody. Everything you’ve said is great. But where are the principles
when you look at the other side?’

‘What you forget,’ Wiesenthal said, ‘is that, a few days before, a convoy of Jewish doctors and nurses was massacred on their way to the Jewish hospital
in Jerusalem. Fifty-eight people were massacred, unarmed people, without any warning like in Deir Yassin. This was a time of war.’

I could hardly believe my ears. Here were two people I like and admire, both defending death and destruction. Rime, the diplomat’s daughter par excellence, seemed to be saying that Syria
has a right to destroy its own people, so long as they’re Syrians! And Simon – that survivor of the camps, chronicler of genocide, conscience of the world, and symbol of justice –
sought to justify the unjustifiable by applying collective guilt, if not selective genocide.

I decided that, as with most political arguments, the more we heard, the less we would want to hear. Besides, as journalists, my students had enough material without letting the war between
Simon and Rime deteriorate into bickering, so I intervened as gently as I could, saying: ‘I would like, when we can, to move the discussion back to Europe.’

William Rush, every inch the image of the all-American boy, had his hand up, so I asked: ‘Is your question about Europe, Bill?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have two.’

His first was a long hypothetical question, which – and that was the journalism lesson of the day! – is exactly what you don’t ask a seventy-four-year-old man one hour and
forty minutes into a two-hour interview late in the evening. To summate Rush’s first question:
Suppose I’m the son of a Nazi officer and you awaken public attention to Nazi crimes
and I go to my father and ask what this is about and he gives me an answer glamourizing what the Nazis did, isn’t the effect of your work the opposite of what you set out to do?

Wiesenthal bristled and, because I could see that not everyone understood that the question was hypothetical, I interjected that ‘it’s a little like what some of your Jewish enemies
say about your “raking up the past.’” Rush started to ask his second question, but Simon said: ‘Let me answer your first question first.’

Almost compassionately, Wiesenthal might have been trying to ‘justify’ Rush’s hypothetical father to him with his reply. If so, there was no need, for Rush’s own father
was an American soldier who, it turned out, had married an Austrian. Wiesenthal’s answer was:

‘The Nazi Party had ten and a half million members. Only one and a half per cent was involved in crimes. Among the membership was a large number of people who joined
the party just to save their existence. It is the same as people in the Soviet Union who join the Communist Party because they have no other choice. So I am making differences among people who were
Nazi Party members. Also, some of the people involved in crimes were not party members, but took advantage of the opportunities to kill, to rape people and property, in such times. With slaves, you
can do anything.

‘Austria had about 700,000 party members. My office is concerned mainly with two or three thousand of them. The rest are for me without any value. I recognize that Austria was a victim of
Nazi expansion. As an Austrian citizen, however, I feel that a former Nazi Party member should not be a minister of the government. We should remember that Austria had over 100,000 victims of
Nazism, not all of them Jews. This is only, you might say, a matter of hygiene . . . I should also tell you that very often to my office come people who were party members and I talk with them
about it.’

Adding that whatever his callers told him was between him and them, and implying that the ones who would come to him have little or nothing to hide, but are people of conscience, Wiesenthal
added: ‘I have a dossier of letters from young people whose parents were in jail or even executed. They ask me to tell them if, in my opinion, their parents were guilty. I would say that I
have a good name with such people if they ask me such a question.

‘And now,’ he said to Rush, ‘to your second question.’

This one was more succinct: ‘You’ve said you can’t live in Israel and that Poland is for you a cemetery. But I’m wondering why you took refuge here in Austria, where
eighty per cent of the SS men and a lot of the Nazi hierarchy came from and many of the concentration camps were. Why not somewhere with a better record, like Switzerland? Why Austria?’

Phrased in various ways, it is a legitimate question I’d heard Simon asked often, and I’d heard him answer it many times, with retorts ranging from ‘I’m an Austrian
citizen and I was born in the Austrian Empire! Why should I live somewhere else?’ to ‘The best way to keep an eye on the murderers of yesterday and tomorrow is to try to live among
them.’ I had never heard him take umbrage at it before. This time, however, his reaction was explosive:

‘You know, I wish not to blame you, but I have talks with neo-Nazis and they are using your terminology absolutely – absolutely the same argument. And do you
know what is my answer? So long as the criminals are free, the war has not ended for me. This is why I am in Austria. I work here. I have the right to be here. I was born in Austria. My father
fought as an Austrian soldier. Why do you send me to Switzerland? Why don’t you send me to other countries? Why don’t you stop people on the street and say “Why do you live here?
Why don’t you go to Sweden?” Why are you doing this to me? Why are you inviting me to go to other countries?’

If Simon stopped there, it might have been a legitimate overreaction. One might have excused the personal outburst and the interrogator’s finger pointing relentlessly at poor Rush. One
could have chalked it up to a misunderstanding brought on by the unfocused first question, fatigue, and, above all, the Middle Eastern debate with Rime. But overreaction turned to overkill when
Simon went on:

‘Don’t you see that this is an infection that we hoped was over? Before the Nazis started, there were here also a number of anti-Semites who said the Jews should go out.’

At this point, Rush put an apologetic word in edgewise, ‘I didn’t mean to ask you to make a choice’, and I tried to change the subject diplomatically: ‘We have time for
two more questions.’

‘No,’ said Simon, standing up from his seat beside me at the head of the class. ‘No more questions. This last question was enough.’

‘I don’t think it was meant the way you’re taking it,’ I started to say to Simon, but Webster University’s European director, Dr Robert D. Brooks, who had been
sitting in on this ‘distinguished guest lecture’, intervened, saying: ‘I don’t mean to be speaking for the student who asked it, but if I had asked it myself, I really would
have meant whether you couldn’t operate more effectively in one of these other countries. I think that is the connotation with which it was asked.’

Simon’s response was: ‘Look, I am tired. Thank you.’ And he headed for the door.

Rime Allaf was the first to collect herself. With the instinct of a born hostess, even when it wasn’t her party, she said ‘Thank you very much’, and the class gave Wiesenthal a
spontaneous burst of applause as he stormed out of the door.

When I phoned Simon the next morning, he said both of Rush’s questions were ‘a provocation’ and Rush was, after all, ‘the son of
a Nazi officer; he said so himself.’ When I told him Rush’s real, rather than hypothetical, background, Simon said nothing.

The following Wednesday, Rime Allaf turned in a paper entitled ‘Justice, Wiesenthal Style’. Even in the heat of an argument in which she, too, had not distinguished herself morally,
she had picked up the vibration that bothered me:

She seized on another quote from Wiesenthal: ‘My office is not working only against criminals that killed Jews. I am not making any difference as to who were the victims.
As long as the criminals are free, the war is not over for me . . . My conscience forces me to bring the guilty ones to trial.’ And she asked: ‘Then why hasn’t his conscience
forced him to bring to trial criminals like Begin?’

After chronicling Wiesenthal’s six prerequisites for genocide – hatred, dictatorship, bureaucracy, technology, time, and a minority as victim – Rime concluded:

More than five years later, when I ran into Rime Allaf in Vienna – where her family had settled after her father retired from his $107,000-a-year UN post in 1987 –
she took a certain perverse
pride in having ‘inspired’ the title of Wiesenthal’s latest autobiography:
Justice, Not Vengeance
. And the last time I
talked to Rime – in late 1992, by which time she had married Juan Canizares, a Spanish classical and flamenco guitarist – she took particular pride that her father had come out of
retirement to head the Syrian delegation to the first postwar peace talks with Israel.

To this day, Simon still inquires after the doings of ‘your Syrian girl. I enjoyed arguing with her. She was good!’ But he insists she had nothing to do with his book’s title:
‘My whole life did.’

Around the time I bumped into Rime, I picked up a curious echo of her reaction to Wiesenthal from – of all people! – Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress: ‘Wiesenthal
makes it sound like 1100 or 1200 war criminals – all the ones he says he’s caught plus a few others he’s still looking into – killed six million Jews, so why should
we
be looking for more, particularly in
his
back yard? Look, I had a glorified view of him for many years and now that I’ve met him – well, I try to keep the view of
him I already had no matter what he says about me. And you have to give him credit that, over so many years, sometimes all by himself, he kept the issue of Nazi criminals alive when the whole
world, even the Jews, wanted to forget. But I’ll tell you a couple of things I’ve learned about Wiesenthal since 1986: he may be a Galician by birth just as I’m one by ancestry,
but he’s lived in Austria long enough to be as litigious as any of the natives – and they’re a litigious people. And the other thing about Wiesenthal is this: he only listens when
he’s
talking.’

Asher Ben Nathan sat in the lobby of a shiny new motel in a workers’ district of his native Vienna in 1987 spicing his breakfast with a fuming cigar. Having given a
lecture on ‘Israel Yesterday and Today: from the Viewpoint of an Ex-Austrian’ at a Socialist Party institute the night before, the former Arthur Pier was free to reminisce about his
postwar days in Austria forty years earlier. Head of the Jewish underground smuggling Displaced Persons into Palestine and founder of the first Documentation Centre in Vienna, the jaunty
‘Arthur’ had worked with Wiesenthal, Tuviah Friedman, and ‘Manos’ Diamant, among others, and remembered them well.

Reassigned back to Palestine in 1947, Asher Ben Nathan had entered the Foreign Service of the newborn nation of Israel in 1948
and risen through the ranks to become, in
1969, Israel’s first ambassador to West Germany. After four and a half years in Bonn, he was named ambassador to Paris and subsequently served as adviser to Shimon Peres, later Prime
Minister. A brief flirtation with Labour Party politics, in which he ran for mayor of Tel Aviv and lost, had done little to subdue the sixty-six-year-old ‘Arthur’, who reappeared as a
visitor to Vienna in early 1987 wearing an undiplomatic plaid jacket over more traditional grey flannel slacks.

Recalling the Wiesenthal of the late 1940s, Asher Ben Nathan said ‘our relationship was quite good for a while’, but acknowledged a coolness, if not a rift, which developed between
the two Nazi-hunters even before he returned to Palestine. Mostly, he says, Wiesenthal made a career of Nazi-hunting ‘while I was concerned with refugees and Palestine and Israel in this
hectic period, so I had no time for the politics and idiosyncrasies of the people with whom I worked – and, later, I went on to other tasks of my own. For me, it was a temporary mission; for
him, it was his whole life.’