lapsing swiftly into the present tense as immediacy takes hold. ‘She gives him
my gold watch and he says OK and goes away. An hour later, he comes back and this time she has nothing to give him, so she is gone. A neighbour told me this.’ Dragged from the ghetto, Rosa
Wiesenthal was put aboard a truck that took her and two dozen others to the freight cars waiting in the yards. They all perished in Belzec, a new extermination camp on the road from Lemberg to
Lublin. Rosa Wiesenthal was sixty-three.
Around the same time, Cyla Wiesenthal learned that, back in Buczacz, her mother had been shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman as she was being evicted from her home. ‘She wasn’t
moving quick enough,’ says Simon, ‘so he shot her on the steps of her own house.’ In all, the Wiesenthals lost eighty-nine relatives to the Second World War – and it is for
them, among millions of others, that Simon stands deputy.
4
Simon and the sunflower
Imprisoned in the Janowskà concentration camp, where brutality and torture reigned, Simon Wiesenthal was often put on work details outside the camp – which should
have been a relief, but wasn’t. Marched through the streets of his city, he could read on the faces of passers-by – even, in one encounter, an ex-classmate’s – that he was
in a parade of the legion of the dead, with each marcher carrying around his own death certificate from which only the date was missing. A year earlier, in the squalor of the ghetto, where each Jew
was allotted two square metres (less than two and a half square yards) of living space, a friend of Simon’s had overheard an old woman’s answer to how God could allow such suffering.
She said simply: ‘God is on leave.’
At such times, Wiesenthal was convinced the world had conspired to accept, without protest or compassion, the fate Hitler had decreed for the Jews. Having lived among Poles from birth, grown up
with them, and attended their schools, Simon knew that ‘to them we were always foreigners. Mutual understanding was out of the question. And even now that the Poles, too, had been enslaved
and were next on Hitler’s list for extermination, nothing had changed: there were still barriers between us.’ Sometimes, this estrangement grew so strong that Simon ‘no longer
even wanted to look at Poles. In spite of the conditions and the risks inside the camp, I would have preferred to stay there. But I didn’t always have the choice.’
On an October morning that would mark him for the rest of his life, Simon Wiesenthal’s work detail was herded past passive Polish faces on Janowskà Street, left on to Sapiehy
Street, and then right into the Technical University, where he had earned his engineering diploma in architecture; his alma mater was now a military hospitalfor German troops
wounded on the Russian front. Before the prisoners could be put to work emptying round-the-clock rubbish from busy operating rooms, a nurse accosted Wiesenthal with ‘Are you a Jew?’
The answer was so obvious that Simon didn’t respond. Satisfied by his silence, the nurse said ‘Come with me’ and led him inside the main building and up the stairs into, of all
places, what used to be the dean of architecture’s office, where Wiesenthal had handed in his assignments in happier times. Now a sick-room, it was the death chamber of a mortally wounded
twenty-one-year-old SS soldier from Stuttgart who had asked not for a priest, but for a Jew to hear his confession.
In the Ukrainian city of Dnyepropetrovsk before he was hurt, the young SS man had participated in a round-up of some 400 Jews, who were packed into a house that was then incinerated. Acting on
orders, his unit had gunned down victims leaping from the flaming building. Now, blinded by a bombshell in the siege of Taganrog weeks later, he still had before his eyes a vision of a family that
had perished in the Dnyepropetrovsk massacre: a father, his clothes afire, shielded his son’s
my gold watch and he says OK and goes away. An hour later, he comes back and this time she has nothing to give him, so she is gone. A neighbour told me this.’ Dragged from the ghetto, Rosa
Wiesenthal was put aboard a truck that took her and two dozen others to the freight cars waiting in the yards. They all perished in Belzec, a new extermination camp on the road from Lemberg to
Lublin. Rosa Wiesenthal was sixty-three.
Around the same time, Cyla Wiesenthal learned that, back in Buczacz, her mother had been shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman as she was being evicted from her home. ‘She wasn’t
moving quick enough,’ says Simon, ‘so he shot her on the steps of her own house.’ In all, the Wiesenthals lost eighty-nine relatives to the Second World War – and it is for
them, among millions of others, that Simon stands deputy.
4
Simon and the sunflower
Imprisoned in the Janowskà concentration camp, where brutality and torture reigned, Simon Wiesenthal was often put on work details outside the camp – which should
have been a relief, but wasn’t. Marched through the streets of his city, he could read on the faces of passers-by – even, in one encounter, an ex-classmate’s – that he was
in a parade of the legion of the dead, with each marcher carrying around his own death certificate from which only the date was missing. A year earlier, in the squalor of the ghetto, where each Jew
was allotted two square metres (less than two and a half square yards) of living space, a friend of Simon’s had overheard an old woman’s answer to how God could allow such suffering.
She said simply: ‘God is on leave.’
At such times, Wiesenthal was convinced the world had conspired to accept, without protest or compassion, the fate Hitler had decreed for the Jews. Having lived among Poles from birth, grown up
with them, and attended their schools, Simon knew that ‘to them we were always foreigners. Mutual understanding was out of the question. And even now that the Poles, too, had been enslaved
and were next on Hitler’s list for extermination, nothing had changed: there were still barriers between us.’ Sometimes, this estrangement grew so strong that Simon ‘no longer
even wanted to look at Poles. In spite of the conditions and the risks inside the camp, I would have preferred to stay there. But I didn’t always have the choice.’
On an October morning that would mark him for the rest of his life, Simon Wiesenthal’s work detail was herded past passive Polish faces on Janowskà Street, left on to Sapiehy
Street, and then right into the Technical University, where he had earned his engineering diploma in architecture; his alma mater was now a military hospitalfor German troops
wounded on the Russian front. Before the prisoners could be put to work emptying round-the-clock rubbish from busy operating rooms, a nurse accosted Wiesenthal with ‘Are you a Jew?’
The answer was so obvious that Simon didn’t respond. Satisfied by his silence, the nurse said ‘Come with me’ and led him inside the main building and up the stairs into, of all
places, what used to be the dean of architecture’s office, where Wiesenthal had handed in his assignments in happier times. Now a sick-room, it was the death chamber of a mortally wounded
twenty-one-year-old SS soldier from Stuttgart who had asked not for a priest, but for a Jew to hear his confession.
In the Ukrainian city of Dnyepropetrovsk before he was hurt, the young SS man had participated in a round-up of some 400 Jews, who were packed into a house that was then incinerated. Acting on
orders, his unit had gunned down victims leaping from the flaming building. Now, blinded by a bombshell in the siege of Taganrog weeks later, he still had before his eyes a vision of a family that
had perished in the Dnyepropetrovsk massacre: a father, his clothes afire, shielded his son’s
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