by Alan Levy
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.’
5
When a Jew chooses to die
It was Simon Wiesenthal’s good fortune that he spent most of the war imprisoned in his own home city of Lemberg without being shipped from the Janowskà concentration camp to Sobibor, Belzec, or any of the nearby extermination camps that took the lives of his mother and eighty-eight other relatives. Whenever he was working as a sign-painter at the Eastern Railroad Repair Works, which was most of the time, he had the chance to see his wife, Cyla, polishing nickel and brass in the locomotive workshop. But, in between rounds at the railway works, he was sometimes yanked back to Janowskà, where he had to look at the broad and beaming face of the deputy camp commandant, Lieutenant Richard Rokita, a chunky Silesian in his late thirties who used to be a café violinist.
‘We called Rokita “the friendly murderer”,’ Wiesenthal recalls. ‘He never beat anybody. He never screamed at us. He just shot prisoners politely. One day, Rokita goes strolling through the camp and sees an old Jew, too weak to be of any use to the Third Reich. The old man salutes him. Rokita greets him cheerfully, drops a piece of paper, and tells the old Jew to pick it up. When the old man bends down, Rokita shoots him dead. Like I said, a friendly murderer.’
Rokita’s pet project was the camp orchestra, which he formed from a wide selection of first-rate musicians imprisoned in Janowskà. Sometimes he conducted evening concerts of Bach, Grieg, and Wagner for the SS cadre, and even appeared as a violin soloist. Mostly, however, his sixty-man orchestra piped the prisoners out in the morning when they left for work details in the city and serenaded them when they returned in the evening. When a well-known Lemberg songwriter, Zygmunt Schlechter, fell into his hands, Rokita commissioned him to compose a ‘Death Tango’, which the orchestra played at public executions of escapees and unregistered Jews caught hiding in the city.
These events took place periodically at the far end of ‘The Pipe’, a six- or seven-foot wide corridor in the no man’s land between the barbed-wire fences of the prison compound and the administrative quarter. No prisoner had ever walked through ‘The Pipe’ and lived, for it led to a sandpit that was the shooting-ground. Sometimes, doomed inmates were left to linger several days in ‘The Pipe’ without food or drink. The SS found it wasteful to execute fewer than ten Jews at a time – and equally wasteful to feed those whose end was imminent.
Once, the amiable Rokita was leading a work detail past ‘The Pipe’ when he saw a handful of condemned men starving as they awaited execution. He ordered a guard to bring them food. As soon as the prisoners had the first morsels in their mouths, Rokita and the guard opened fire, killing them all. The condemned men had eaten their last meal.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ Rokita told his appalled work detail. ‘You have nothing to fear . . . You’re healthy, aren’t you? These fellows were sick. It was a happy release for them.’
Janowskà was ruled by two SS rivals: First Lieutenant Fritz Gebauer, the camp’s Gestapo chief, and Second Lieutenant Gustav Wilhaus, who ran its everyday operations. Both men despised each other – to such an extent that Wilhaus called his dog Fritz. Though outranked, Wilhaus could get away with such gestures as well as open defiance, for his brother-in-law was SS Major-General Friedrich Katzmann, the police chief of Galicia who’d treated the children and tricked the mothers of Lemberg ghetto in 1942.
Disregarding all the Nazi proscriptions against relations with Jews, Gebauer kept a young Jewish mistress at the camp. His wife consoled herself by sleeping with her Jewish chauffeur. To inmate Leon Weliczker, the impression made by Gebauer, a Berliner in his early thirties, was ‘striking. He had more than average good looks. He was tall and broad-shouldered. He usually held himself bowed slightly forward, which suggested an aristocratic stance. Most striking of all were his jet-black deep-set eyes, which sparkled . . . He had a very pleasant, melodic voice with a pronounced masculine tone, and in general seemed to have some kind of inner life.’
Despite this inner life and his marriage’s sexual affinity for Jewish lovers, Gebauer had celebrated the Jewish feast of Purim early one spring by forcing six Jews to spend Purim’s first night outside the barracks in freezing weather because they ‘look sick’ and might infect the others. ‘In the morning,’ Weliczker testified at the Eichmann trial, ‘all six people were frozen lying down where they were put out the night before: completely white like long balls of snow.’
On another freezing morning, Gebauer picked eight Jews out of a roll-call line-up because, he said, ‘they don’t look too clean.’ They were ordered to undress and soak in a barrel of cold water – all day and all night. ‘Next morning,’ said Weliczker, ‘we had to cut the ice away’ from their corpses.
‘Wilhaus,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘was a perfect sadist. He lived in a house inside the camp with his wife, Hilde, and his daughter, a blonde six-year-old named Heike. One morning, several Jewish labourers were putting up a building near his house. Eye-witnesses saw Wilhaus on the balcony of his villa with his wife and Heike. He pointed at the masons as they bent down, working on the brick wall. They must have reminded Wilhaus of the figures12 used as targets on the shooting-range, for suddenly he took his gun, aimed carefully, and fired. A man fell. Heike thought this was a wonderful game. She clapped her hands. Papa aimed carefully again and hit another target, killing the man. Then he handed his gun to his wife and told her to try. She did. Down went the third Jewish mason.’
On Tuesday, 20 April 1943, Wilhaus decided to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s fifty-fourth birthday by sacrificing fifty-four Jewish intellectuals. There were, however, only some forty professional men and women left in Janowskà, so Wilhaus ordered a round-up of others who were on work assignments outside the camp. A blank-eyed, slit-mouthed Silesian SS killer named Richard Dyga was dispatched to fetch Wiesenthal and two other men from the Eastern Railroad Repair Works. Though their German civilian boss, Adolf Kohlrautz, pleaded that he needed them, Dyga insisted he had his orders and Kohlrautz bade Wiesenthal farewell with a sorry shrug.
Along their way back to Janowskà, Dyga rounded up other educated Jews and delivered them all to ‘The Pipe’, where the rest of the camp’s intelligentsia, including a handful of women, were already assembled, making their peace with life in silence. When attendance was complete, six SS men – one of them carrying a submachine-gun – marched the prisoners through the barbed-wire corridor, two abreast.
‘Each of us walked by himself,’ Wiesenthal recalls. ‘Each of us was alone with himself, with his thoughts. Each was his own island of solitude. That was our privilege, our strength.’
An April shower burst as they reached the rim of the sandpit, where they could gaze down at naked corpses from earlier executions. Nearby, a truck waited, its motor running. The new victims were told to take off all their clothes, fold them neatly, and place them on the truck in individual piles so they could be sorted by size.
‘Now one could have no illusions; the end was surely near,’ says Wiesenthal. ‘The Nazis killed you only when you were naked, because they knew, psychologically, that naked people never resist.’
The truck drove off with their clothes. The fifty-four naked men and women stood in a single row along the rim as the executioner lifted his submachine-gun and began to move them down with one burst apiece. After the fifth or sixth shot, there was a brief delay when one man fell backwards on to the ground instead of into the pit. An SS man had to go over and kick him in. Then the shooting resumed.
Through the pelting rain, as Wiesenthal waited for the end, he vaguely heard a whistle and some shouts, but the sounds of this earth no longer penetrated his senses. The man next to him, however, heard the word ‘Wie-sen-thal!’ and, almost as if relaying a phone call, said, ‘It’s for you.’
Just outside ‘The Pipe’, an SS corporal was asking, ‘Is Wiesenthal in there? Wher
e’s Wiesenthal?’ Simon snapped to attention and said ‘Here!’
‘Follow me!’ the corporal commanded and, to Simon’s amazement, led him back out through ‘The Pipe’ for the first and last time any prisoner ever made a round trip.
‘I staggered like a drunk,’ he recalls. The SS corporal had to slap his face twice ‘to bring me back to earth.’
The executioner, too, was flabbergasted. He was supposed to shoot fifty four people, not fifty-three. ‘What do we do now?’ he asked the corporal.
‘Continue!’ the corporal commanded. Before Wiesenthal was out of earshot, fifty-three Jews were dead. He never asked if the SS found a fifty-fourth, but suspects they did. All he knows is that ‘for a long time, I was the only person I knew in the camps who still believed in miracles.’
The corporal marched him to a warehouse, where the truck had not yet unloaded his clothing or the fifty-three other piles to be fumigated for redistribution. After dressing quickly, he was escorted back to the railway works where he had started his day an eternity ago.
Kohlrautz was grinning from ear to ear as he welcomed Simon back. He had been on the phone with Wilhaus, Gebauer, and others to convince them that Wiesenthal was the best man alive in Lemberg to paint a giant poster – with swastika, white letters, and red background – proclaiming ‘WIR DANKEN UNSEREM FÜHRER’ (We Thank Our Leader) for the birthday celebration.
‘You know, Simon,’ said Kohlrautz a few minutes later, ‘it’s not only Hitler’s birthday today, but it’s yours, too.’
Kohlrautz, who was killed in the battle of Berlin in 1945, never asked any questions about the two pistols he let Simon store in his desk drawer. Simon had obtained them from the Polish underground cell in the railway works. In his capacity as sign-painter, he had freedom to roam the yards. The Polish resistance figured he might be useful in future sabotage, since their eventual plan was to blow up the Lemberg railroad junction at a crucial moment. Besides, he was an architect, engineer, and draughtsman who could draw maps pinpointing the most vital and vulnerable positions. Would he co-operate?