Nazi Hunter (9 page)

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 figures
¹²
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? Where’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?

Yes, said Simon, for a price: his wife’s freedom.

Cyla Müller Wiesenthal was blonde and could pass for a Pole. The underground smuggled her out of the yards one night and gave her the identity of ‘Irene Kowalska’ with which she
took a morning train to Warsaw and settled into an apartment that was
waiting for her at 5 Topiel Street. Cyla found herself sharing the flat with the wife of the Polish poet
Jerzy Lec, but Mrs Lec was also using a pseudonym, so neither woman knew the other’s identity – or that the other was Jewish, too.

Still quite sure he wouldn’t survive the war, Simon rejoiced that his wife might. Soon, virtually all Jewish women in ghetto and camp were liquidated, so he knew he had made the right move
for Cyla. Now he had to look after himself. In late September 1943, when word came down that Jewish prisoners who lived at the railway works would soon be spending their nights at Janowskà,
Wiesenthal read between the lines and concluded it would be fatal for him to go back there. Even Kohlrautz kept looking at him and asking: ‘Simon, what are you waiting for?’

Kohlrautz often sent Simon, guarded by a Ukrainian policeman, into town to buy art supplies and run other errands for him. On Saturday, 2 October 1943, Wiesenthal and Arthur Scheiman, a former
circus director, requested passes to go shopping before the stores closed. Kohlrautz was glad to oblige. While the German boss went looking for a particularly stupid Ukrainian to accompany them,
Wiesenthal and Scheiman fished the two pistols out of Kohlrautz’s drawer. He came back with a real prize: a Ukrainian who was new to Lemberg and didn’t know the city. With a wink, a
wave, and a sly
‘auf Wiedersehen!’
(‘See you again!’), Kohlrautz sent them off to town.

They visited a stationery store that had front and back entrances. They told their guard to wait for them at the cashier’s desk near the front. Knowing that nobody could leave without
paying, he assented. Then they left by the back door.

A Polish friend from the underground sheltered them in his apartment for a couple of days. Then Scheiman rejoined his wife, a Ukrainian seamstress, who hid him in her clothes closet by day when
her customers came for fittings. The partisans moved Simon to a nearby village, Kulparkow, where the parents of a Polish girl who worked at the railway yards hid him in the attic of their house.
From this base, he helped the partisans build bunkers and lines of fortification. ‘I was not so much a strategic expert as a technical expert,’ he recalls, telling how he worked closely
with the partisans in the region.

A little nomenclature is necessary here. By late 1943, two main groups of Poles-in-exile were already competing for control of
postwar Poland: Stalin had allowed his Polish
prisoners of war – taken by the Red Army between 1939 and 1941, when Russia and Germany were allies – to form a military corps under General Wladyslaw Anders which fought with
distinction against the Germans. But the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile in London had broken relations earlier in 1943 over a German revelation which, for once, was all too true:
in a forest near the Polish village of Katyn, the Germans had found the mass grave of some 4250 Polish officers massacred by the Russians in 1939.
¹³
In eastern Poland almost five years later, there were two main underground groups fighting the Germans: The Polish National Resistance Movement, or Home Army (
Armja
Krajowa
, known by its initials
A.K.
), supported from and by England, and more nationalistic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Soviet than
A.L.
, the People’s Army, which was
supported by the Russians. Nevertheless,
A.K.
and
A.L.
didn’t fight each other. But, says Wiesenthal, ‘there were also partisan groups which were friendly with the
Germans. One was
UPA
, the Ukrainian Partisan Army. It had support from the German Army to fight other partisans. It was anti-Soviet and it received its equipment from the
Germans.’