Simon Wiesenthal - World War II

World War II

World War II began in September 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland. As a result of the partitioning of Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, the city of Lviv was annexed by the Russians and renamed Lvov. Wiesenthal's stepfather, still living in Dolina, was arrested as a capitalist; he later died in a Soviet prison. Wiesenthal's mother came to live with him and Cyla in Lvov. He bribed an official to prevent his own deportation under Clause 11, a rule that prevented all Jewish professionals and intellectuals from living within 100 kilometres (62 mi) of the city, which was under Soviet occupation until the Germans invaded in June 1941.

By mid-July all Jews in Lvov were required to wear an armband with a star of David, and Wiesenthal and other Jewish residents had to register to do forced labour. Within six months the Nazis had a ghetto constructed using Jewish forced labour. All Jews had to give up their homes and move there, a process which took several months. Several thousand Jews were murdered in Lvov by Ukrainian nationals and German Einsatzgruppen during June and July. In his autobiographies Wiesenthal tells how he was arrested on 6 July but saved from execution by a man named Bodnar, his former foreman, who was now a member of the Ukranian Auxiliary Police. There are several versions of the story, which may be apocryphal.

In late 1941, Wiesenthal and his wife were transferred to Janowska concentration camp and forced to work at the Eastern Railway Repair Works. Simon painted swastikas and other inscriptions on captured Soviet railway engines, and Cyla was put to work polishing the brass and nickel. In exchange for providing details about the railways, Wiesenthal obtained false identity papers for his wife from a member of the Armia Krajowa, a Polish underground organisation. She travelled to Warsaw, where she was put to work in a German radio factory. She spent time in two different labour camps as well. Conditions were harsh and her health was permanently damaged, but she survived the war. The couple was reunited in 1945, and their daughter Paulinka was born the following year.

Every few weeks the Nazis would stage a roundup in the Lvov ghetto of people unable to work. These roundups would typically take place while the able-bodied were away for the day doing forced labour for the Nazis. In one such deportation, Wiesenthal's mother and other elderly Jewish women were transported by freight train to Belzec extermination camp and killed in August 1942. Around the same time, a Ukranian policeman shot Cyla's mother to death on the front porch of her home in Buczacz while being she was being evicted. Cyla and Simon Wiesenthal lost 89 relatives during the Holocaust.

Forced labourers for the Eastern Railway were eventually kept in a separate closed camp, where conditions were a little better than at the main camp at Janowska. Wiesenthal prepared architectural drawings for Adolf Kohlrautz, the senior inspector, who would submit them under his own name. Construction companies would pay bribes to Kohlrautz, who shared some of the money with Wiesenthal. He was able to pass along further information about the railroads to the underground and occasionally left the compound to obtain supplies, even clandestinely obtaining weapons for the Armia Krajowa and two pistols for himself, which he later took along when he escaped in autumn 1943.

According to Wiesenthal, on April 20, 1943, Second Lieutenant Gustav Wilhaus, second in command at the Janowska camp, decided to shoot 54 Jewish intellectuals in celebration of Hitler's 54th birthday. Unable to find enough such people still alive at Janowska, Wilhaus ordered a roundup to be conducted in the satellite camps. Wiesenthal and two other inmates were taken from the Eastern Railway camp to the execution site, a trench 6 feet (1.8 m) deep and 1,500 feet (460 m) long at a nearby sandpit. The men were stripped and led through "the Hose", a six- or seven-foot wide barbed wire corridor to the execution ground. The victims were shot and their bodies allowed to fall into the pit. Wiesenthal, waiting to be shot, heard some whistles and shouts, and someone called out his name. He was returned alive to the camp; Kohlrautz had convinced his superiors that Wiesenthal was the best man available to paint a giant poster in honour of Hitler's birthday.

On October 2, 1943, according to Wiesenthal, Kohlrautz warned him that the camp and its prisoners were about to be liquidated. He gave Wiesenthal and fellow prisoner Arthur Scheiman passes to go to town, accompanied by a Ukrainian guard, to buy him stationery. The two men escaped out the back of the shop while their guard waited at the front counter.

Wiesenthal did not mention either of these events—or Kohlrautz's part in them—when testifying to American investigators in May 1945, nor in an affidavit he made in August 1954 about his wartime persecutions. He has variously reported that Kohlrautz was killed on the Russian Front in 1944 or in the Battle of Berlin on 19 April 1945.

After several days in hiding, Scheiman rejoined his wife, and Wiesenthal was taken to the nearby village of Kulparkow by members of the underground, and remained there until the end of 1943. The Janowska camp was being liquidated, and it was no longer safe to hide in the nearby countryside. Wiesenthal returned to Lvov and spent three days hiding in a closet of the Scheiman's apartment. He next moved to the apartment of Paulina Busch, for whom he had previously forged an identity card. He was arrested there, hiding under the floorboards, by two Polish detectives on 13 June 1944 and taken back to the remains of the camp at Janowska. Wiesenthal tried but failed to commit suicide to avoid being interrogated. In the end there was no time for interrogations, as Soviet forces were advancing into the area. SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Friedrich Warzok, the new camp commandant, rounded up the remaining prisoners and transported them by train to Przemyśl, 135 miles (217 km) west of Lvov, where he put them to work building fortifications. By September Warzok and his men were taken to serve at the front, and Wiesenthal and the other surviving captives were sent to the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp.

By October the inmates were evacuated to Gross-Rosen concentration camp, where there was severe overcrowding and a shortage of food. Wiesenthal's big toe on his right foot had to be amputated after a rock fell on it while he was working in the quarry. He was still ill in January, when the advancing Russians forced yet another evacuation, this time on foot, to Chemnitz. Using a broom handle for a walking stick, he was one of the few who survived the march. From Chemnitz the prisoners were taken in open freight cars to Buchenwald, and a few days later by truck to Mauthausen concentration camp, arriving in mid-February 1945. Over half the prisoners did not survive the journey. He was placed in a death block for the mortally ill, where he survived on 200 calories a day until the camp was liberated by the Americans on 5 May 1945. Wiesenthal weighed 90 pounds (41 kg).