Nazi Hunter (87 page)

Still, there was more to it than that. ‘Whenever we meet, Wiesenthal and I,’ he volunteered, ‘we meet by chance and then he will embrace me, but we keep our distance. He never
attempts to contact me because he knows that I know things about him that other people don’t know about. That’s all, so let’s leave it at that. I don’t want to say
more.’

Asked if their estrangement had anything to do with Bruno Kreisky’s accusations that Simon collaborated in one way or another with the Gestapo, Asher Ben Nathan was quick to disclaim them:
‘All these accusations have been looked into in Israel. We concluded that the man was no hero and no saint, but there’s no proof of him being anything worse.’ And, pressed for
more, he concluded: ‘Well, I’ve admired the way the man has grown into an elder statesman, an international personality. He’s much more sure of himself than the chap I met who was
still living in a camp when we got to know each other. All the time his reputation was growing, he never tried to contact me. He did what he did, but I have my own ideas and he knows what I think.
When we do meet, he never tries to get close and I certainly have no reason to.’

In his 1960 autobiography, Tuviah Friedman sketches the self-styled ‘desperado’ Wiesenthal who ‘had a dispute with “Arthur” and preferred to work on his own.’
Wiesenthal had little use for the
Four Power politics among Austria’s military occupation governments and their relations with Pier’s ambitious fifth column of
Jewish agents. ‘Listen, Tadek,’ Simon told Friedman. ‘Maybe your “Arthur” cares
who
finds Eichmann, but I don’t. I just want him found.’ In
Friedman’s version of history (which both Simon and Asher Ben Nathan consider unreliable), Simon comes across as an any-means-to-an-end person and ‘Arthur’ doesn’t.

If there has been a recurrent motif in Simon’s later years, it has been his use of ‘
I am not a hater
’ almost to the extent of cliché. Whether applied to
Ukrainians, Kreisky, or the World Jewish congress (or anybody except, perhaps, Elie Wiesel), it has informed his life through the slings and arrows of the Waldheim affair and beyond. It made him,
in his eighties, a more mature person than the man who stormed out of Webster University when nearing seventy-five – and this is not always the direction in which the elderly age. I caught a
glimpse of this dimension (and of how grandly Simon was ageing) in late 1988, a few weeks before his eightieth birthday, when I confronted him with Asher Ben Nathan’s 1987 quotes about
him.

Simon reacted positively at first, as though congratulated: ‘He is absolutely right that I was growing. Also he is right when he says I am no hero, no saint; I am just an ordinary
man.’ Then, after a brief pause to allow his listener to dispute this, Simon went on: ‘This man was a hero of mine. In those times, we looked upon those people who were coming from
Palestine to us as supermen. Later, we found out they were human beings just like us.

‘My difficulties with him were never
about
him because he did very good work in Austria and later in Germany and France. They were about the people who worked for him. We
disagreed over his friends. Some of his friends were not my friends. So there were little jealousies on their part, which must have hurt his opinion of me, but, more than that, some of the Jews he
used had held functions under the Nazis. And, even when they had functioned honourably, it was my policy –
Lex Wiesenthal
– never to employ people who were compromised. OK,
“Arthur” thought otherwise – and I should make it clear that he used them only for the benefit of his job, not for personal benefit.

‘I still like the man very much. When his son died in the Yom Kippur War I went to him and his wife in Paris to tell them how
sorry I felt that such a thing had
happened to their son and to them and that such things still happen to people just because they are Jews. And, if we haven’t spent much time together lately, it’s because I think of him
as too important and busy a man for me to waste his time. Like I said, he was a hero of mine.’

Was he still?

‘Look,’ said Simon, ‘the next time he and I meet, I won’t say anything to him about what he said to you, but I’ll know to spend more time with him. So thank you. I
would hate for either of us to go to the grave feeling coolness about the other.’

43

In 1999, soon after turning ninety, Simon Wiesenthal gave up driving. He also stopped celebrating birthdays in Israel with his daughter, grandchildren and great-grandson.
‘Instead, they come to me all year round. [Daughter] Pavlina is arriving with her husband next week. When they are here, this is for me vacation,’ he told me in his own eloquent English
when I visited him in Vienna early in 2002, three weeks after his ninety-third birthday on New Year’s Eve. ‘So I stay here all the time. I wish not to provoke the Lord.’

Life goes on for the venerable Nazi-hunter – and that in itself is his ultimate victory over the dwindling ranks of World War II criminals who survive uncaught: to outlive them.

‘It’s my situation,’ he says philosophically, ‘but I’m not responsible for it.’

Would he like to outlive Alois Brunner, the master genocidist? Four years Wiesenthal’s junior, the Austrian-born Brunner was Eichmann’s enforcer in Vienna and Prague in 1938–9
and later in Bratislava, Paris and Greece. Still in Syria after half a century, Brunner has been silent since the death of his protector, President Hafez al-Assad, in 2000. Wiesenthal’s
information is that ‘Brunner is probably alive and somewhere in Syria, but is no more in the capital, Damascus. Still, he is safe in Syria because there to kill Jews is not a crime . . . But
I don’t think about outliving him and maybe he doesn’t think about me. When I came out of the war alive in 1945, that was victory for me.’

His three secretaries take turns chauffeuring him to and from his Jewish Documentation Center in downtown Vienna. On doctor’s orders, Wiesenthal spends only five mornings a week in the
office,
but one of the secretaries told me he takes his work home with him every noon.

‘I am ninety-three years old and I am every day in the office. Why?’ he said more rhetorically than boastfully. ‘Because this is my life. After fifty-six years, you cannot
overnight change and say “OK, I sit home.” If I sit home, I am waiting for the death. Here, I still get many letters and I answer them. But some of the letters I am sorry I didn’t
get thirty years before.’

‘Are there no more Nazis left to catch?’ I asked him.

‘No European Nazis more. Old Nazis, no,’ he replied. ‘If they are from my generation, they live now overseas – in South America. And their children and grandchildren are
not more Nazis. They are hoping for a better life. But there are other young people, the new Nazis, who wish to carry on in the old way. They worry me.’

Across the border in the Czech Republic, where I live, that means skinheads, who bully and even murder Roma (Gypsies). But Wiesenthal was more general: ‘There are people in Western Europe
who cannot forgive that for more than fifty years we have had no war. So they make war.’

As a champion of Roma, who endure discrimination – by bourgeois Czechs and the school system – that can be as painful as a beating by skinheads, Wiesenthal had a simple solution to
the country’s ‘Romany problem’: ‘Let the Roma live. Make them more intelligent. Give them an education and, after a time, the only question will be: “What are
Roma?” Nobody will even know any more that this intelligent man or that one is Romany.’

Our conversation about the seamy side of Bohemian life only served to make a mellow Wiesenthal wax nostalgic for his student years in Prague (1928–32):

‘Those four years were the best time of my young life. I came from Poland after being ‘liberated’ too many times by Cossacks and Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and Austrians
– all at odds with each other, but all anti-Semites. The Czechs, on the other hand, were always fair to Jews; the Slovaks weren’t. Only in Prague was I ever forgetting I was a
Jew.’

Once, though, a Czech classmate from the provinces invited him home for a weekend. Wiesenthal remembers hearing his friend shout into the crank-up phone in the dormitory corridor: ‘Mom,
I’m bringing Wiesenthal with me. He’s a Jew, but you’ll like him.’

The old man recalls the episode fondly. If he has any regrets, it is that his self-curtailed travel schedule means he won’t provoke the Lord by seeing Prague again.
Even when US President Bill Clinton presented him with America’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, at the White House on 9 August 2000, Wiesenthal didn’t make
the trip, but gave a resounding acceptance speech via a special radio hookup:

‘I am many times honoured, but that honour I particularly liked.’

Any regrets about the Nobel Peace Prize?

A sigh.
‘Ach!
I got the Erasmus Prize – the Dutch Nobel Prize – in 1992. And I am a
Doctor honoris causa
nineteen times over.’

As I left, I heard him reciting by rote the universities that had granted him honorary doctorates – from Washington and Webster universities of St. Louis to Ohio Wesleyan to the University
of Natal in South Africa. The man may have mellowed, but the mind is as agile as ever. Alois Brunner had better watch his step.

Vienna–Prague, April 2002