One who is less than half aware of the history of the times might take up this book with a vague notion that it was about the life and persona of a man famous for hunting down some of the criminals against humanity who had managed to hide from justice for years, indeed, for decades, until his efforts caught up with them.
And the book does begin with a chapter about him and his personal history, as a part of the larger scape that his time and place were deeply involved in, with all the resulting finesses to do with the role of Austria and Austrians in the nazi movement, the anschluss, the holocaust and aftermath.
But really the book has a much larger canvas, which is that of the major parts of the work of the man in his untiring and often solitary on going war for justice in hunting the criminals down. And so the subsequent chapters methodically deal with some of the prominent nazis he managed to hunt down.
But the surprising part is, despite the horror and disgust evoked by each of the said criminals, and they are indeed horrendous, with names involved being Eichmann, Mengele, Stangl and likes of them - it's the three or so chapters that deal with the question of Kurt Waldheim that grip one, and not only because he was head of U.N. and subsequently the president of Austria, but more so because, it's someone famous for various reasons but mostly because the world is still unclear in this respectabout whether he indeed was a war criminal, the lack of clarity being as much due to lack of decisive evidence still to be found against him, as for Waldheim's seemingly permanent policy of evasions until caught and then a verbose evasion until caught, on and on.
At the very beginning, of course, there is a chapter describing his background - his being born, life in Poland that had shifting birders what with this or that neighbour occupying a part here or there, his education, and disruption of life that was brought by WWII and German occupation followed by ghetto life and concentration camps, his surviving it and miraculously meeting his wife who had equally miraculously survived as well, and the beginning of the life that he led thereafter, not as the architect he had qualified as but a seeker of justice for the victims of holocaust. As the author describes his umpteenth meeting with him, this one after Wiesenthal was ninety and had curtailed his travels,
" Our conversation about the seamy side of Bohemian life only served to make a mellow Wiesenthal wax nostalgic for his student years in Prague (1928–32):
‘Those four years were the best time of my young life. I came from Poland after being ‘liberated’ too many times by Cossacks and Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and Austrians – all at odds with each other, but all anti-Semites. The Czechs, on the other hand, were always fair to Jews; the Slovaks weren’t. Only in Prague was I ever forgetting I was a Jew.’
Once, though, a Czech classmate from the provinces invited him home for a weekend. Wiesenthal remembers hearing his friend shout into the crank-up phone in the dormitory corridor: ‘Mom, I’m bringing Wiesenthal with me. He’s a Jew, but you’ll like him.’ The old man recalls the episode fondly."
-------------------------------------------
Quoting from the book,
""All too often in this part of the world, fear of one lie gives birth to another lie, in the foolish hope that by protecting ourselves from the first lie we will be protected from lies in general. But a lie can never protect us from a lie. Those who falsify history do not protect the freedom of a nation but rather constitute a threat to it. The idea that a person can rewrite his autobiography is one of the traditional self-deceptions of Central Europe. Trying to do that means hurting oneself and one’s fellow countrymen. When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete."
– Czech (then Czechoslovak) President Václav Havel at the opening of the Salzburg Festival in Austria after he was introduced by President Kurt Waldheim on 26 July 1990 (translated from the Czech by Káča Poláčková-Henley)."
"No Nobel for Simon Wiesenthal makes him no less noble. Rabbi Hier of the Wiesenthal Centre puts it most eloquently:
‘Simon, to his credit, doesn’t have to apologize to anyone for what he’s done with his life. Without Simon Wiesenthal, the subject of the Holocaust would not really receive serious attention anywhere in the world. Let’s also state for the record that, although the popular writers on the Holocaust began writing in the sixties – that’s when Elie Wiesel first started getting published, too – there was still a big period of time between 1945 and the early sixties: a crucial period when there was the greatest pressure to forget. But if there was one person who kept it alive, that was Simon Wiesenthal. So this is all to his credit that nobody can take away from him. Without him, all this that we’re talking about in America, the mere fact that there would be in Washington a President’s Council, a Commission on the Holocaust headed by Elie Wiesel, would have been an impossibility, because the subject would have been forgotten. Simon was a stubborn man who kept it alive through the worst of times.’
When Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, Simon Wiesenthal did not rejoice at this recognition of Holocaust remembrance, for no love has been lost between these two titans of survivorship. Though Wiesel once came to Wiesenthal’s rescue as a fund-raiser when his Viennese bank collapsed in 1974, Simon says that Wiesel later opposed his poaching on his turf when the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies was built in Los Angeles three years later. One bone of contention was Simon’s insistence that the Wiesenthal Centre, despite being a division of Yeshiva University, should take a non-sectarian approach to the Holocaust:
‘I was for over four years in different camps with people from fifteen nations: Jews, Gentiles, gypsies, communists. Through this experience, my view on the Holocaust and the whole problem of Nazism is a lot different from Elie Wiesel, who was only six months in camps and only with Jews. For me was the Holocaust not only a Jewish tragedy, but also a human tragedy. After the war, when I saw that the Jews were talking only about the tragedy of six million Jews, I sent letters to Jewish organizations asking them to talk also about the millions of others who were persecuted with us together – many of them only because they helped Jews. This made me unpopular with Jewish organizations – and, when the Wiesenthal Centre happened, I became a danger to them. Elie Wiesel wrote that what I was doing was “a diminution” of the tragedy. But he and they are the diminishers, for it is they who reduced the whole tragedy to a problem between Nazis and Jews instead of a crime against humanity. ‘I know I am not only the bad conscience of the Nazis.
I am also the bad conscience of the Jews. Because what I have taken up as my duty was everybody’s duty.’"
Needless to say, a must read.
-------------------------------------------------
Some interesting insights are in the earliest part, one with Simon Wiesenthal telling the author about his work, life and more:-
"I am tired, too. I cannot teach my work to other people. There is nobody to succeed me, nobody left who is much younger, who would have my experience or could find out all that I carry in my head. But I will never retire . . . If I ever close my Centre here, I will have nothing to do but wait for my death. Besides, there are others waiting, too. For if I closed my office, it would be a Nazi holiday and a Jewish defeat – a defeat for humanity, a defeat for justice, too. And, believe me, the “heroes” will celebrate it as a victory – and they will begin again that much sooner.’
He denied he was ‘some kind of modern Don Quixote or Jewish James Bond.
'Yes, my work is an adventure, but there are no romantics about it. You could make thriller after thriller out of my files, but I am not like James Bond because the results are not immediate; they can come in years, they may take generations. And Don Quixote I am not. Yes, many times I am fighting against imagination or a world that doesn’t understand, but my fight is not without results.’
On his way out, he confided: ‘I will tell you a secret. For a man who was in a ghetto and in concentration camps and lost all his blood relatives, my biggest personal satisfaction is not in having a Nazi arrested. It comes when two Nazis have a quarrel and one threatens the other with “I will go to Simon Wiesenthal about you.” And he does! They are my best informers.’"
-------------------------------------------------------------------
And this, following, is a couple of valuable gems, hidden from most:-
"In Albert Speer’s later years, Hitler’s master builder and diarist of Nazi times had struck up what could not be called a friendship, but a research relationship with Wiesenthal.
So Simon didn’t hesitate to try out his theory on Speer, whose reply came from Heidelberg in an elegant envelope with an ‘A.S.’ monogram and no return address:
'I can’t answer your question completely. Hitler in my presence never spoke of a syphilitic disease, though this does not mean he might not have had one some time earlier. What I can tell you is that his private doctor, Theo Morrell, used to hang his shingle on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin as ‘Specialist in Skin and Venereal Diseases’. From the moment he became the chief official physician of Hitler in 1936, however, that listing of his specialty disappeared.'
This intrigued Wiesenthal, who told me: ‘I am working on it in my spare time. If I can find a solution in another five or ten years, I would be very happy because this would give the whole story of Hitler and the Jews a different picture.’
‘But where do the Jews enter that picture?’ I asked him.
‘Ah!’ said Simon, slapping his knee. ‘I haven’t told you something else. A few years ago, I have a talk with a man who went to school with Hitler. I ask him what Hitler was like in school and he says, “Normal. But maybe this hatred began after he got this infection from a Jewish whore.” . . . So I am looking now for names and details. I am just in the first stages, but I am telling you that if I can find out with evidence that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was the aftermath of an infection from a Jewish prostitute, then all the Nazi racial theories sink a layer lower in the sewer. All the Nazis were anti-Semites, but hardly any of them had any personal experience with Jews. If Hitler did, this gives an answer to why he hated Jews the way he did.’
When I met him, Wiesenthal’s research had brought him in contact with an expatriate physician, Edmund Ronald, then living in Portugal.
In the early 1950s, while working in a Seattle hospital, Dr Ronald had met a young Austrian doctor from Graz who said his late father, also a doctor, had treated Hitler for syphilis long ago. After Austria had been annexed by Germany in 1938, Gestapo agents had confiscated all of his father’s files on that particular patient, but the father had informed his son that Hitler told him he’d caught the disease from a Jewish prostitute before World War I. Though Dr Ronald gave Wiesenthal the name of his source, the young doctor from Graz later settled in the US and has not proved traceable. In 1977, there was a medical debate over whether Hitler was sterile or impotent and Dr Ronald wrote from Bordighera, Italy, to the International Herald Tribune that
'Hitler was rather unlucky in his sexual affairs. He caught – according to Dr Anwyl-Davies, the eminent London venereologist – syphilis from a Jewish prostitute in Vienna in 1910 and had to have anti-syphilitic treatment on and off for the next twenty years and it is not certain that he [was] ever completely cured.'
Dr Ronald, who subsequently died, went on to note that Hitler’s love affair with his Viennese niece, Angela ‘Geli’ Raubal, ended with her unexplained suicide in 1931 at the age of twenty-three.
Wiesenthal suspects she killed herself after her uncle infected her with syphilis. Wiesenthal’s work on Christopher Columbus had been more concentrated and productive. ‘In my research on anti-Semitism throughout history,’ he explained, ‘when I concentrated on the Spanish Inquisition, I discovered an amazing coincidence. The two most important events of 1492 – both of which determined the entire future of Spanish history and much of world history – were the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the discovery of America. All Jews had to be off Spanish soil by midnight of August second.
‘Now Columbus didn’t sail for “India”, as they called all of Asia in those days, until August third, as scheduled. But his sailors had orders to report on the night of the second. This was not customary: a sailor’s last night in port was sacred to him and was usually spent with his family or girlfriend before he came on board next day. I asked myself why.
‘The tides weren’t right for an earlier departure. And why did Columbus personally supervise the roll-call? So I began to look at the roll he called. One tenth of his crew was Jews; some of them, I learned later, may have been rabbis. But, even though nine-tenths of the crew wasn’t Jewish, there was no priest aboard. Very unusual at sea!
‘Then I am looking into the financing of his voyage. This business of Queen Isabella hocking her jewels to pay for it is all legend. With the help of Marrano ministers of hers, the mission was entirely financed by Jewish money.’ A Marrano (from the Spanish word for ‘pig’ or ‘damned’) was a Jew who, in Wiesenthal’s words, ‘outwardly pretended to be a Christian, but secretly remained a Jew’, while a Converso was ‘a convert who broke off all relations with Jews and assimilated’. Both were suspect. It had been the discovery of Marranos partaking of a Passover seder in 1478 that led to the creation of the Spanish Inquisition, which used the rack, the pyre, the wheel, branding-irons and blinding-rods as well as bizarre pure-blood laws (direct ancestors of Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws of racial purity) to get to the very bottom of a victim’s religious beliefs.
‘I began to ask myself,’ Simon went on, ‘why the Jews financed Columbus when all others had refused for years. Who was he and what did the Jews want from him?’
Cristoforo Colombo (1451–1506), an Italian mariner known to Spaniards as Christóbal Colón, came from a family of ‘Spanish Jews settled in Genoa’, according to his contemporary biographer, Salvadore de Madariaga, who believes the Colóns converted to Christianity during Spanish persecutions in the fourteenth century. Around 1479, Columbus married a Portuguese noblewoman of Marrano descent. After some preliminary study, Wiesenthal went to Spain to examine materials preserved in the Biblioteca Columbina (Columbus Library) in Seville. In the archives, Simon found a dozen intimate letters from Columbus to his son, Diego. All of them bore not just the obligatory cross at the top, but also a strange boat-like symbol in the upper left-hand corner.
With the help of an American Jewish scholar named Maurice David, Wiesenthal deciphered it as two Hebrew characters, beth and hei, standing for baruch hashem, meaning Praised be the Lord. It was, Wiesenthal thinks, Columbus’s way of reminding his son: ‘Do not forget where you come from. The cross is a tribute to the religion you now follow, but within the circle of your family give the sign beth hei, so that they remember their origins.’ In one of the letters, Wiesenthal adds, he discussed with Diego the possibility of marriage to a Marrano.
‘I spent a lot of time in Seville,’ Wiesenthal went on. ‘I had in my hands all his writings that have survived – not just letters, but books he had read, with his jottings in the margins, and books he valued enough to have copied for himself at his own expense: usually by hand, because this was very soon after Gutenberg.4 Now why would you imagine that a Christian sailor five hundred years ago would make a copy of a work by Rabbi Samuel Jehudi urging Jews to accept conversion, even forced baptism? There were just too many coincidences.
‘In all, I find two hundred and fifty references by Columbus to Jews. He knew the Jewish calendar, the Jewish prophets, and his diary showed a deep knowledge of Jewish history. The beliefs of Columbus were a mixture of Christianity and Judaism. In a book of history by Pope Pius the Second, he makes a marginal note that the year 1481’s Jewish equivalent was 5241. He writes that Adam lived to be one hundred fifty years old and, when he tells how the Second Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in the year Seventy by the Romans, he calls it Casa secunda, the Second House. Only Jews use that phrase; in no non-Jewish publication have I ever met this idiom, Second House.
‘But the most important marginal note I find is the one that tells me Columbus knows the diary of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, who travelled in the east three centuries before him and came to the conclusion that the ten lost tribes of Israel were in “India”. I have this book in my own library. So now I go back to the register of the crew and look a little closer. Not only are there a number of Jewish names, but later I learn that several in Columbus’s crew spoke Hebrew and a couple of them may have been rabbis. And who was the interpreter on board? Luis de Torres, who had been interpreter for the Governor of Murcia, which had a large Jewish population. It took me two weeks to confirm that Luis de Torres had been the governor’s interpreter of Hebrew. Now the only possible explanation of this is that Columbus expected to reach countries in which Jews lived and governed.’
From research on Columbus that began around 1965, Wiesenthal was convinced ‘that the Jews, concerned about their deteriorating situation in Spain,5 were looking for a homeland, a place to flee to, where they would find a protector. And so, in the belief that the ten lost tribes had found refuge in “India”, they financed the expedition of Columbus: a man they could trust.’ Simon says Columbus was surely a Converso and quite likely a Marrano: ‘I am convinced he was following the Law of Moses. But I’m not saying to the bitter end that I’m sure he’s Jewish. I make the matter open.’
Still, when Simon wrote a book-length manuscript that became Sails of Hope: the Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus, he hesitated to offer it to publishers because ‘I feel when I give out that Columbus had a Hebrew interpreter, people will think I am absolutely crazy or else some Jewish fanatic. So I cannot publish the book. But then I have an idea. I was invited to lecture in Lisbon, so I am going to the Royal Library there and looking on the documents of Vasco da Gama, who was also looking for a way to India and really found it.6 He had also an interpreter for the Hebrew language. When I saw this, now I should publish.’
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.”’"
