The
death of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal brings to a close a
storied career shrouded in achievement, in dazzle and
perhaps even in mystery. Wiesenthal's life, like those of
all Holocaust survivors, may be described in three
chapters: "Before," "During" and "After." The last is the
most mysterious.
"Before"
was the life of a young boy born in Galicia whose thigh
was cut by a Ukrainian soldier, and who was forced by the
quota system to leave home and to study architecture in
Prague. He married his high school sweetheart, Cyla --a
marriage that would last 67 years-- and practiced his
trade designing houses in Poland, until that country was
divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. For two
years he lived under Soviet rule, at one point paying a
bribe that "saved" him and his family from deportation to
Siberia. As it turned out, the sufferings of Siberia
would have been preferable to the fate he met.
"During" began
with the German invasion of Soviet-held territories in
1941 and the murderous rampages of the first stages of
the Final Solution. Over the next four years he found
himself in 12 camps, Janowska and Mauthausen among the
most famous. Mauthausen helped shape his future path.
Fewer than one in three prisoners there was a Jew; the
rest included Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), Jehovah's
Witnesses, Spanish Republicans, and ordinary criminals.
Wiesenthal never forgot these other victims of
Nazism.
"After," of
course, was a fabled career as a Nazi hunter, replete
with honor and international reputation, cherished by the
Jewish community, feared by the perpetrators and
respected by the international community, or so it seems
now. But for a long time it was quite
different.
To begin with,
even his own wife wanted him to return to his former
profession and rebuild his life --elsewhere, not on the
continent soaked with the blood of Jews, including 89
members of his own family. But Wiesenthal had found a
calling, and in his pursuit of it he was unyielding,
tenacious and indefatigable-- a stiff-necked man, heir of
a stiff-necked people.
Wiesenthal
insisted that Nazi criminals be brought to justice, not
to death. He intuited that justice was needed --or at
least the attempt at limited, imperfect justice-- if the
world was to rebuild after the destruction he had
witnessed. He did not cooperate with those seeking
revenge, even though their path was more certain, more
immediate, more passionate and perhaps even more
just.
But after the
first trials and the grand theater they represented, and
the much heralded successor trials, there was much less
enthusiasm for facing the past, much more for getting on
with the future.
Wiesenthal
pressed on. He opened a documentation center and started
corresponding with survivors all over the world, seeking
to identify the perpetrators and to locate them. But in
the mid-1950s, his documentation center was forced to
close because of lack of funding and lack of interest in
the hunt for Nazi war criminals: Israel was at war; it
needed intelligence on the Arabs and not the Germans, and
it had strategic interests --basic survival interests--
and, soon, important financial and trade interests with
Germany. The American Jewish community was not yet
prepared to buck American national interests.
Wiesenthal's
cause only began to gain wide support with the capture,
trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s.
Contrary to popular perception, Wiesenthal did not
capture Eichmann. Israel's Mossad did the work.
Wiesenthal's contribution can be described as
modest.
Still, if his
hand in the actual capture has been exaggerated, his role
in preparing the world for it cannot be. For years before
the nabbing, Wiesenthal had a hunch about the widows of
Nazi criminals: He suspected that the men they married
during the postwar years were in fact their former
husbands with new names and new identities. Eichmann's
wife tried to have him declared dead so that she could
receive a pension and so that Eichmann's name would
disappear from the list of the wanted. She even produced
an affidavit "proving" that Eichmann had died in Prague.
But Wiesenthal would not let her get away with it; he
produced his own documents declaring that witnesses had
seen Eichmann alive after the date of his supposed death.
He also alerted Israeli and World Jewish Congress
officials to information that Eichmann had escaped to
Rome and then had gone to South America --but they were
uninterested in pursuing the issue. In frustration, he
closed his office, shipped off material to Yad Vashem and
went through an emotionally tough time.
After Eichmann's
capture and the fame brought about by the trial,
Wiesenthal was able to reopen his office and greatly
increase support for the modest center. Though the
numbers are not precise, it is said that Wiesenthal was
involved in bringing 1,100 Nazis to justice. Some were
major criminals; others were minor. One, Josef Megele,
eluded him. In fact, Mengele's death in a drowning
accident, a simple death without suffering, violated
Wiesenthal's sense of justice.
Even after he
settled into fame, however, Wiesenthal was no stranger to
conflict and controversy. At home in Austria, he squared
off again and again with Austrian Chancellor Bruno
Kreisky, who was of Jewish origin but was often seen as
opposing Jewish causes. He drew criticism when he refused
to condemn Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian leader and former
United Nations secretary-general, as a Nazi war criminal.
Wiesenthal conceded that Waldheim had been a Nazi and a
liar, but he claimed the evidence did not permit him to
label Waldheim a criminal. This cost him friends, allies
and even, some have said, the Nobel Prize he might have
shared with Elie Wiesel, the other iconic Holocaust
survivor.
Actually,
Wiesenthal's most well-known philosophical battle was
with Wiesel. The two squared off indirectly in the late
1970s over the question of who were the true victims of
the Holocaust; that is, was the Holocaust a Jewish event
or a universal event? Wiesel argued that the Holocaust
was a uniquely Jewish experience, settling the role of
non-Jews in the Holocaust with the turn of a phrase:
"While not all victims were Jews, all Jews were
victims."
Wiesenthal, in
contrast, argued that the Holocaust was the death of 11
million people, 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews.
The figure was invented: If we consider all civilian
non-Jewish deaths, then it is too small; if we consider
only those who died at the hands of the Nazi killing
apparatus, then it is too large. But the central point
was Wiesenthal's belief that the inclusion of non-Jews
was essential to his postwar commitment. Nations had to
feel that they had lost their own if they were to bring
the war criminals to justice.
As we approach
the High Holy Days and contemplate our fate before the
ultimate throne, we think of the divine attributes of
Justice and Mercy. Wiesenthal believed in the importance
of justice, inadequate justice, imperfect justice, and
the idea that we might wait for Divine Justice to give
the killers the reward they truly deserve.
There is a
paradox of the Holocaust: The innocent feel guilty, and
the guilty feel innocent. But Wiesenthal threw a wrench
into the equation: He often said that his greatest
contribution was that the killers did not sleep very well
at night; they were afraid of capture. Their exaggerated
sense of his power and of the power of the Jewish
community caused them no small amount of unease. I would
like to think he was right. Let the guilty feel worried
even if they are unburdened by their guilt.
He retired from
Nazi hunting several years ago, declaring --albeit
prematurely-- that he had outlived the perpetrators.
Others stepped in to fill the breach. But even long after
all these disputes are indeed over, Wiesenthal will be
remembered for his perseverance and determination, for
the idea that justice or at least the attempt at justice
--maybe even only the illusion of it --is an essential
restorative measure to a broken world. Other men and
women-- perpetrators of heinous crimes, genocide and mass
murder-- will sit in the docket because of that
idea.
Wiesenthal said
that he wanted to go to his death being able to say with
absolute conviction that he had not forgotten --not the
victims and not their killers. This, above all else, he
certainly did.
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