Nazi Hunter (4 page)

When Wiesenthal’s French literary agent, Charles Ronsac, sold
Sails of Hope
to six European publishers and Macmillan in America (1973), an editor in the New York office objected
facetiously: ‘The Italian Mafia will kill us!’ and Wiesenthal said: ‘After this book is published, all Jews will have three holidays: Rosh Hashonah, Yom Kippur, and Columbus
Day.’

Actually, the only problem came in Spain, where a Wiesenthal reference to three Franco families who sailed to the New World in 1510 was punctuated with: ‘Franco was a common Jewish name in
the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.’ This did not sit well with the fascist dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1892–1975) and
Sails of Hope
was
banned in Spain. Wiesenthal says the reference was no accident and was, in fact, his way of thanking Franco for his reluctance to repatriate Jewish refugees who escaped to Spain during the war.

During my dialogues with Wiesenthal, I wondered what the Hebrew interpreter Luis de Torres, who was the first member of the expedition to set foot in the New World, might have said to the
‘Indians’ when the
Pinta
,
Nina
, and
Santa Maria
landed in the Bahamas on 12 October 1492: ‘Did he address them in Hebrew?’

‘That I don’t know,’ Simon said, adding deadpan, ‘But I can tell you what the Indians said back to the white man: “Now begins the
tsuris
.”’
⁷

2

When Simon Wiesenthal turned ninety on 31 December 1998, many well-wishers thought he had already been eighty all year because his date of birth was in 1908 – but barely.
Bare is how he was born half an hour before midnight on New Year’s Eve 1908 in his parents’ bedroom in the small town of Buczacz (pronounced
Boo-tchotch
) in Galicia, then the
eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now the western part of the Ukrainian republic. ‘Through half an hour, I am older by a year,’ he says with a laugh whenever an
interviewer, subtracting 1908 from the present, overestimates his age. When the midwife emerged with the news that a healthy boy was born, Asher Wiesenthal opened a bottle of schnapps and, with a
handful of relatives and neighbours, toasted a particularly Happy New Year.

The midwife dutifully registered Szymon’s birth in the town office, but his superstitious maternal grandfather, believing that 1909’s first-born would win God’s special favour,
took the liberty of also enrolling him at the top of the new year’s book of life. The old man’s wife was something of a mystic, as befits a woman whose maiden name was Freud. She liked
to take her grandchild on outings to various ‘miracle rabbis’ of Galicia and have special blessings bestowed upon the boy. ‘All my education before school was my
grandmother,’ Simon recalls, ‘with her stories of rabbis and miracles. Through this education, I not only tend to think in a Talmudic way, but I can always reason with rabbis and other
religious people because I speak their language.’

The map of Europe in 1909 was vastly different from (and in some ways similar to) the Continent we know now. There were no countries called Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, but there were prickly
nations known as Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. Albania was a monarchy and Bulgaria and Romania were major powers. Poland was part of Russia, though the city of Cracow was
Austro-Hungarian. Austrian might extended from the Alps southward into Italy (a vestige of the Habsburg dynasty’s reign until 1806 as Holy Roman Emperors) and nearly a thousand miles eastward
from Vienna. With the annexation of Bosnia and Herzogovina a few weeks before Szymon was born, Austria – already a formidable naval force through its port of Trieste – ruled the
Adriatic.

In the Austrian crown-land of Galicia – with its 1,700,000 Ukrainians, 1,000,000 Poles, and 800,000 Jews – smouldering tensions enabled the Viennese Habsburgs to divide and rule with
deceptive ease. In Buczacz, however, Jews were no minority, for the land’s ethnic mix was reversed: of the town’s 9000 inhabitants, 6000 were Jews, 2000 Poles, and, at the bottom of the
local ladder, 1000 Ukrainians, mostly poor and of peasant origin.

A Jew could hold his head up high in Buczacz, says Simon, though Galicia in general, he hastens to add, was traditionally the land of pogroms: ‘Nowhere else have the Jews suffered so much
for so long.’ His own father used to tell him how a village priest, who loved his schnapps, but couldn’t always pay for his drinks, left his church key as security with a Jewish
tavern-owner one Saturday night, promising to settle his debt out of Sunday’s collection. Next morning, when his Ukrainian parishioners couldn’t get in to attend mass, he told them:
‘The dirty Jew at the pub has locked you out. Go get the key from him!’ They did – by beating the Jewish pub-keeper within an inch of his life, smashing or drinking everything in
his tavern, celebrating mass, and then extending the celebration with a little local pogrom, amen!

The Ukrainians of Galicia were descendants of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Cossacks whose leaders made an unfortunate alliance with the Grand Duchy of Muscovy (now Moscow) in 1641. It
imposed the Czar’s yoke upon the whole Ukraine, a territory of 232,000 square miles, which exceeds the areas of France and England. Devoutly Catholic and fiercely independence-minded, the
Ukrainians were neither the first nor the last people in the world to hold the Jews somehow responsible for their plight. To this day, Simon Wiesenthal is still battling Ukrainians – in
Canada, the US, and elsewhere around the world, if not in the Ukraine itself.

Asher Wiesenthal, a 1905 refugee from the pogroms of czarist Russia, had established himself in Buczacz as a solid citizen trading in sugar and other wholesale commodities.
Simon’s own memories of early childhood are pleasant ones of going to his father’s warehouse and erecting his first houses and castles with white sugar cubes. They were the Lego of
yesteryear for one who would grow up to be an architect and ‘learn to build houses according to certain structural rules so that they could withstand an earthquake’ – only to
change careers after discovering the hard way that ‘“The Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was the kind of earthquake for which there was no building code.’

Wiesenthal remembers, too, the Passover table with an extra, ornate cup set for the prophet Elijah. After a special prayer, Szymon – and later his brother, for this was the
youngest’s honour – would open the door and leave it ajar, for, sometime that evening, the prophet was expected to enter the room and sip from his cup. In the same way that other
children elsewhere in the world wait up for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, the Wiesenthal boys would watch the door with wide eyes that narrowed as the night wore on. ‘But, of course,’
says Simon, ‘nobody came.’ Their grandmother, however, insisted that Elijah really drank from the cup and, when they found it full, she would say: ‘He doesn’t drink more
than a tear.’

* * *

With the outbreak of world war in 1914, Asher Wiesenthal, a reservist in the Austro-Hungarian Army, was called up to active duty and sent to the eastern front. There he died in
combat in 1915 – fighting for the same cause for which Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler was soldiering on the western front. In a war that would cost the world eight and a half million deaths and
nearly thirty-eight million casualties, Szymon and his brother wept for their father as the only one among many.

Around that time of bereavement, the town of Buczacz became a battleground. When the Czar’s Cossacks conquered Galicia, the bereaved Wiesenthals were forced to flee because, as Simon
recalls, ‘someone told the Russians that my father was not only an enemy soldier who had died fighting Russians, but a refugee from Russia
and therefore we were Russians
who killed Russians. We didn’t know what they would do to us, but we knew they’d find an excuse to do something, so my mother and brother and I escaped to the Austrian part of the
empire and I was a refugee in Vienna for the first time around.’

They took rooms on the Bäuerlegasse in the Jewish quarter known as ‘Matzoh Island’ between the Danube Canal and the river. Both Wiesenthal boys started school in the Austrian
capital where, from 1907 to 1913, the Austrian-born, possibly syphilitic Hitler had tried to show the world he was a painter. Twice rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts, Hitler noted that four of
the seven professors who denied him admission were Jewish and wrote to the Academy that ‘for this the Jews would pay.’ And, in his autobiographical
Mein Kampf (My Struggle)
,
Hitler wrote that Vienna was ‘the hardest, though most thorough, school of my life’ – the place where he learned his anti-Semitism from the ideas of the German nationalist Georg
von Schönerer (1842–1921) and the utterances of Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna from 1896 until his death in 1910

Simon has few memories of his stay in Vienna as a six- and seven-year-old – except that it was a relatively happy time before the glory and jubilation of war gave way to hunger and defeat.
A Jewish family whose patriarch had perished on the Russian front was welcomed and even honoured in a city that was thriving on wartime prosperity and patriotism even while Franz Joseph slowly
breathed his last in Schönbrunn palace and the dead and dying piled up in cattle trucks on railway sidings throughout his doomed empire.

After Franz Joseph died on 21 November 1916, the Wiesenthal boys had a day off from school to watch the Kaiser’s black funeral coach crawl through the city, but they were hardly aware that
an era had ended. The austere but beloved Kaiser (Emperor) had reigned for nearly sixty-eight of his eighty-six years. His twenty-nine-year-old grandnephew, who became Emperor Karl I, would preside
irresolutely over the dissolution of the 640-year-old Habsburg monarchy, which had less than two years to live.

In 1917, the Russians retreated from Galicia and the Wiesenthals returned to Buczacz, where they were caught up in the swirl of history. ‘I come from a very windy corner of Europe. Our
part of Galicia changed hands so often that I was six times “liberated” before I finished high school,’ Simon recalls with irony. ‘After the Cossacks
liberated us from the Austrians and then the Austrians liberated us back, it was the Ukrainians’ turn to liberate us and, for three months after the armistice in 1918, eastern
Galicia was the Western Ukrainian Republic. Then the Poles liberated us and we became Polish. After the Polish-Bolshevik War began in 1920, the Soviets liberated us. Then the Poles came back. To
survive under such circumstances is a school, I tell you. Nobody could teach
us
anything new until, a couple of liberations later, we got Hitler.’

Of all the early ‘liberations’, the brief Ukrainian postwar interim was the most painful for young Szymon. Like their Cossack forebears, the Ukrainians robbed, raped, and killed, but
their fuel was alcohol and their troops could drink the Czar’s army (as well as themselves) under the table. One afternoon, their high command gave the Jews of Buczacz an ultimatum to deliver
300 litres of schnapps by five o’clock or their homes would burn. Szymon and his brother and mother and every Jew in town scoured Buczacz for booze and, when the Ukrainian demand was met,
they stayed indoors for the long night of revelry ahead.

The next day, as drunken soldiers still staggered and slept in the streets, women were afraid to venture outdoors, but Szymon’s mother thought it safe to send her ten-year-old son across
the road to borrow yeast from a neighbour for baking. As Simon returned, a soldier on horseback gave chase and, just for fun, lunged at him with a sabre, slashing his right thigh. Simon collapsed,
but neighbours carried him into his house. The doctor who stitched the wound had to reach his patient by a labyrinthine route through cellars and back yards. Wiesenthal still wears that scar across
his upper thigh, but insists quite sincerely that ‘some of my best friends are Ukrainians. One of them saved my life in 1941.’

As the Red Army, founded by Leon Trotsky, overran the Ukraine, the newly independent Poles pushed the Ukrainians out of Galicia and went to war with Russia themselves. The Ukrainians’
various successors were less brutal, but scarcely benevolent. Attending the local academic high school (Humanistic Gymnasium, it was called) in the 1920s, Simon recalls, ‘we would get up in
the morning not knowing which regime was in power. When we were asked to who we swore our eternal loyalty, we had to look at the picture on the wall above the teacher’s table. One week it was
Lenin, the next there was a Ukrainian, and then it was the Polish Marshal Pilsudski.
The Bolsheviks rounded up all the
bourgeoisie
and made them pay ransom. My mother
and other Jewish women were made to clean up the local sports hall, which the Russians had turned into a stable.’ Memory of this humiliation still smarts; eyes and mouth narrow as he relates
it.