Simon Wiesenthal - Early Life

Early Life

Wiesenthal was born at 11:30 pm on December 31, 1908, in Buczacz, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria (then part of Austria-Hungary, now Buchach, Ternopil Oblast, in Ukraine). His father, Asher Wiesenthal, was a wholesaler who had emigrated from Russia in 1905 to escape the pogroms of the Russian Empire. A reservist in the Austro-Hungarian Army, Asher was called to active duty in 1914 at the start of World War I. He died in combat on the Eastern Front in 1915. The remainder of the family—Simon, his younger brother Hillel, and his mother Rosa—fled to Vienna as the Russian army took control of Galicia. The two boys attended a German-language Jewish school. The family returned to Buczacz in 1917 after the Russians retreated. The area changed hands several more times before the war ended in November 1918.

Wiesenthal and his brother attended high school at the Humanistic Gymnasium in Buczacz, where classes were taught in Polish. There Simon met his future wife, Cyla Müller, whom he would marry in 1936. Hillel fell and broke his back in 1923 and died the following year. Rosa remarried in 1926 and moved to Dolyna with her new husband, Isack Halperin, who owned a tile factory there. Wiesenthal remained in Buczacz, living with the Müller family, until he graduated from high school—on his second attempt—in 1928.

With an interest in art and drawing, Wiesenthal chose to study architecture. His first choice was to attend the Lviv Polytechnic, but he was turned away because the school's Jewish quota had already been filled. He instead studied the Czech Technical University in Prague, where he studied from 1928 until 1932. He was apprenticed as a building engineer through 1934 and 1935, spending most of that period in Odessa. He married Cyla in 1936 when he returned to Galicia.

Sources give differing reports of what happened next. Wiesenthal's own biographies contradict each other on many points; he also over-dramatised and mythologised events. One version has Wiesenthal opening an architectural office and finally being admitted to the Lviv Polytechnic for an advanced degree. He designed a tuberculosis sanitorium and some residential buildings during the course of his studies and was active in a student Zionist organisation. He wrote for the Omnibus, a satirical student newspaper, and graduated in 1939. Author Guy Walters states that the earliest Wiesenthal biography does not mention studies at Lviv. He quotes a curriculum vitae Wiesenthal prepared after World War II as saying he worked as a supervisor at a factory until 1939 and then worked as a mechanic in a different factory until the Nazis invaded in 1941. Wiesenthal's 1961 book Ich Jagte Eichmann ("I Chased Eichmann") states that he was working in Odessa as an engineer from 1940 to 1941. Walters says that there is no record of Wiesenthal attending the university at Lviv, and that he does not appear in the Katalog Architektów i Budowniczych (Catalogue of Architects and Builders) for the appropriate period.