Nazi Hunter (11 page)

6

The last time Simon Wiesenthal saw Lemberg – on Wednesday, 19 July 1944 – he and thirty-three other survivors of Janowskà were marched through the city,
under heavy Red Army artillery fire, to the railway yards where he and Cyla had worked before their escapes and where his mother and thousands of other ageing women had stood suffering for three
days without water in crammed freight cars beneath blazing summer sun not quite two years earlier while awaiting deportation to the fires of Belzec.

Put aboard a freight car, Simon and his fellow hostages worried whether they were going to be gassed – until SS man Blum, who’d been in charge of the Askaris, added two more
passengers: his dog and, in a cage, his canary. ‘That was the best news,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘because the SS men all loved their pets and would never be so unhuman as to gas
them
. Blum said we’d all be shot if anything happened to his bird or his dog. So we took extra special care of them.’

They reached the city of Przemysl, 125 miles west of Lemberg, the next morning and were transported to the town of Dobromil, where the railroad tracks gave out. Then they were marched along the
main road west, already clogged with civilians fleeing the Russians. The 200 SS men guarding the thirty-four Jewish slave labourers were running for their lives, too, and when a horse-drawn convoy
of
Volksdeutsche
(ethnic Germans from Poland) overtook the group, Warzok – Janowskà’s runaway commandant – halted them and commandeered thirty of their forty
wagons.

With each wagon piloted by a Jew and six or seven SS men riding shotgun to ‘guard’ him, this cowardly caravan caught up near the last bridge across the Raver San with a German Army
column retreating from the Red Army, which was coming closer and closer. If the soldiers with their heavy equipment crossed the bridge first, the Russians might well catch up
with ‘SS Construction Staff Venus’, as Warzok called his bootleg work force.

Though only a captain – but an SS captain! – Warzok pulled rank and a weapon on the Army major commanding the retreating unit. With his pistol held to the major’s head and
other SS men covering the column with submachine-guns, Warzok ordered his wagons to cross the bridge first and then took two Army engineers across with him while keeping the major and his officers
covered with a submachine-gun. The bridge had already been planted with dynamite for eventual destruction, but Warzok had the engineers do it now – leaving their unit and its furious major to
be captured by the Red Army while Construction Staff Venus went unscathed and unreported.

Near the Polish city of Grybow, Warzok’s crew of captors and captives pitched camp in the middle of a large field. Wiesenthal painted a sign proclaiming it headquarters of SS
BAUSTAB VENUS
and, for more than a month, the war and the world passed them by without asking any questions.

One September day, however, an SS
Rottenführer
(corporal) named Merz asked Wiesenthal a question of his own. Merz, whom Wiesenthal considered a relatively decent
Rottenführer
, had gone foraging for food and taken Simon along because he spoke Polish. Now, toting two sacks of potatoes, they relaxed beside a babbling brook at the edge of a
rustling forest. The weather in Eastern Europe is at its best in September and, stretched out on his back, Merz studied the hazy sky above and let his mind wander.

‘Suppose an eagle took you to America, Wiesenthal,’ he asked. ‘What would you tell them there?’

Fearing a trap, Wiesenthal said nothing. But Merz persisted: ‘Don’t be afraid. You can talk frankly.’

Wiesenthal evaded the question: ‘
Herr Rottenführer
, how could I get to America? I might as well try to go to the moon.’

Rottenführer
Merz wouldn’t let Simon off the hook: ‘Just imagine, Wiesenthal, that you’re arriving in New York and the people ask you, “How was it in those
German concentration camps? What did they do to you?’”

Taking his life into his mouth, Wiesenthal replied haltingly: ‘I believe – I believe I would tell the people the truth,
Herr Rottenführer
.’

Merz didn’t shoot him. He simply said: ‘You would tell the truth to the people in America. That’s right. And do you know what would happen, Wiesenthal?
They wouldn’t believe you.’

With these words, Merz reinforced Wiesenthal’s will to live – and prove him wrong.

Merz Schmerz
was what Wiesenthal would call the pain caused by daily fulfilment of the cynical but wise
Rottenführer’s
prophecy. Still, as the war
neared its inevitable end – painfully, usually fatally, slowly for those caught in the camps – the need to bear witness gave thousands of the doomed, many of them more than half dead
already, a new grip on survival: a reason for enduring. At Treblinka, would-be suicides who wrapped ropes around their necks were often talked down from their improvised nooses by other Jews who
convinced them their testimony would be needed.

As the Germans stepped up their programme of deportation and gassing, hundreds of Jews launched their own programmes of writing and recording. Mordecai Tenenbaum, a Jewish resistance leader in
Vilna and later in Bialystok, kept a journal with names and dates and details throughout his adventures and told his fiancée, Tamara Sznajderman, a courier for the Jewish Fighting
Organization, to ‘live, live at any price so you can tell the story; you are so good at that.’ After she was killed in combat in the Warsaw Ghetto in early 1943, a few months before he
led an uprising in which he perished in Bialystok, Tenenbaum buried his journal in the ground for posterity to unearth. Its opening words were: ‘Greetings, unknown seeker who discovers these
pages.’

Way back in 1933 in Warsaw, a far-sighted young Jewish historian named Emanuel Ringelblum had started collecting documents and taking notes on Hitler’s earliest decrees in neighbouring
Germany with an eye to how they might affect Polish Judaism and inspire ‘Jewish countermeasures’. Even before the Jews were arbitrarily moved by the German occupiers into what became
the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, Ringelblum was noting such everyday details as ‘Dr Cooperman was shot for being out after eight o’clock. He had a pass’, and a ban on the posting of
obituary notices. Later, Ringelblum would record the gallows humour of the ghetto: ‘If the Germans win the war, twenty-five per cent of the Jews will be dead by then. If the British win,
seventy-five per cent will be dead – because the English will take so long.’

Deported in early 1943 to a labour camp, Ringelblum was smuggled out and back to Warsaw by the Jewish resistance because his mission was so vital. In hiding, he continued
his chronicles, even though he was on a list of nineteen key resistance figures whom the London-based Polish government-in-exile had agreed to bring out to freedom. By the time action was possible,
sixteen were dead. Ringelblum and the other two refused to be rescued ‘because we must fulfil our duty to society.’ Arrested again that March with thirty-seven other Jews hiding in a
bunker, Ringelblum was tortured by the Gestapo and then executed with his wife and son a few weeks before the twenty-eight-day Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 1943: the war’s most heroic
armed conflict and a resounding rebuttal to Jewish submission to genocide.

When the ghetto was liquidated, 56,000 of its 60,000 Jews were dead; most of the rest were deported to the death camps. But Ringel-blum’s notes and other archives (including the first
eye-witness account of exterminations at Treblinka)) were found in milk cans and tin boxes dug up in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1946 and 1950. In the ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1945
and 1962, searchers in the bone-riddled earth near where the crematoria once burned day and night unearthed five manuscripts of workers in the
Sonderkommando
whose job was to destroy the
remains of the gassed; late in 1980, a sixth – written in Greek and preserved in a buried Thermos – was discovered by Polish schoolchildren planting a tree. All these manuscripts were
posthumous – but their authors’ words lived to tell the truth.

The posthumous ‘diary of Salomon Tauber’ – a
Kapo
(Jewish policeman) in the ghetto of Riga, Latvia, who packs his wife into a gassing van – triggers the plot of
a living work: Frederick Forsyth’s 1972 novel,
The Odessa File
. There is not a word of invention in this fictional ‘diary’, for it is drawn from depositions in Simon
Wiesenthal’s office.

Thus, Wiesenthal himself looks upon his conversation with
Rottenfiihrer
Merz and the spiritual pain that followed as a moment of truth that opened unto him his future as an archangel of
revelation and retribution. He uses it without any comment or embellishment as a closing postscript to his 1967 memoir,
The Murderers Among Us
. Asked about it now, he recalls that only
after he left Lemberg could he consider any horizon wider than his wife’s safety somewhere in
Warsaw and his own survival from day to day, or dawn to dusk. But his
Polish odyssey – in the custody of 200 SS killers who needed him and some thirty other Jews to keep themselves alive – opened his eyes to the reality that Germany was actually about to
lose the war and his captors were looking for ways to melt into the mass of German society which had embraced Hitler without committing the crimes he’d entrusted to the SS. To Wiesenthal,
even while hauling potatoes with no end in sight except extinction, the prospect of their postwar assimilation was intolerable.

‘I learned later,’ he says, ‘that ninety-five per cent of the real criminals survived the war through tactics like Warzok’s. But I could see even then that the real
soldiers on both sides were fighting and dying – and against them the odds were much higher. And for us, the Jews in German or Ukrainian hands, we would be lucky if five per cent survived. A
soldier is not a killer. He fights with the risk he can kill or be killed. And this risk was too high for SS killers like Warzok and Dyga and Blum. Helpless people in a camp or a ghetto can be
killed without any risk – without
any
risk!’ Unable to ride on the wings of Merz’s mythical eagle or a magic carpet that would bear him to America to tell the truth about
the camps to an unbelieving, uncaring world, Prisoner Number 127371 began at potato level to dig for data and descriptions, recorded at first only in a retentive mind, which would document the
destruction of a people at the hands of the Nazis and bring more than a thousand perpetrators to some semblance of justice.

As the Russians neared Grybow, SS Construction Staff Venus pulled up stakes and moved west again, stealing food as it went. Drawing near the German border, Commandant Warzok
knew he would have to present his superiors with a more rational military profile than 200 SS men guarding fewer than three dozen Jews. Thus, in Chelmiec, his SS men surrounded a church during mass
and kidnapped all the worshippers – men, women, and children – to work for Venus.

Near Neu Sandez (now Nowy Sacz), Warzok summoned Wiesenthal’s engineering skills to survey terrain for building anti-tank barricades along a steep, narrow dirt road which ended atop a
lonely hill.
‘Herr Kommandant,’
Wiesenthal pointed out respectfully, ‘this road leads nowhere. No tank would ever come here.’

Slapping his holster, Warzok barked: ‘Did I ask for your military opinion?’ Wiesenthal recognized that Warzok was merely making work to keep out of a war that
was already lost.

‘For a while,’ Wiesenthal recalls, ‘we built defences against tanks that would never come. Then the Russians came closer, so we moved again, this time to the Plaszow
concentration camp just outside the city of Cracow, and there Dyga and another SS man took most of the Jews into the nearby woods and shot them’ after the camp authorities had performed a
perfunctory ‘selection’ of which ones they would take.

A German general had discovered the Venus hoax, dissolved the ‘construction unit’, and shipped Warzok and his SS men back to the front. ‘Warzok is still around
somewhere,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘and I hope I’ll find him before the biological solution catches up with us both.’