Лев Гунин - ГУЛаг Палестины

turned into "April 1943," "beaten" has become "murdered," "in a house" has become "in the

street," the "railway inspector" has become a "German soldier," and the "Gestapo" has become the

"SS." The last might seem like a fine point, but in fact the Gestapo and the SS had clearly

defined and mutually exclusive duties: "A division of authority came about whereby the Gestapo

alone had the power to arrest people and send them to concentration camps, whereas the SS

remained responsible for running the camps" (Leni Yahil, The Holocaust, 1987, p. 133). Perhaps

a fine point to someone who had not lived through these events, but to someone who had lived

through them, then one would imagine a memorable point, one that should be easier to remember

than, say, what color suit each participant wore at some huge function.

And so now we are forced to wonder whether this is the same event badly remembered, or whether

Mr. Wiesenthal was discovered twice under the floorboards, once in 1943 and again in 1944. The

more cynical reader might even go on to wonder whether any such event took place at all.

As the above comparison illustrates, and as a reading of Mr. Wiesenthal proves a hundred times

over, Mr. Wiesenthal's salient characteristic is not that he has a photographic memory, but

rather that he cannot tell a story twice in the same way. For a second example, take the case

of the Rusinek slap.

The Rusinek Slap

Former inmates took over command. One of them was the future Polish Cabinet

Minister Kazimierz Rusinek. Wiesenthal needed to see him at his office to get

a pass. The Pole, who was about to lock up, struck him across the face - just

as some camp officials had frequently treated Jews. It hurt Wiesenthal more

than all the blows received from SS men in three years: "Now the war is over,

and the Jews are still being beaten."

... He sought out the American camp command to make a complaint. (Peter

Michael Lingens in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 12)

That is one version, but here is another:

A Polish trusty named Kazimierz Rusinek pounced on Simon for no good reason and

knocked him unconscious. When Wiesenthal woke up, friends had carried him to

his bunk. "What has he got against you?" one of them asked.

"I don't know," Simon said. "Maybe he's angry because I'm still alive."

(Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 69)

These two accounts are so different that one wonders whether they are of the same event. In the

first account Wiesenthal is addressing Rusinek when Rusinek slaps him, while in the second

Rusinek pounces on him, which suggests an ambush. But more important, when you have been

pounced on and knocked unconscious, when you become aware that your friends have carried you to

your bunk only after you have regained consciousness, then you would not ordinarily describe

that as merely having been "struck across the face." Mr. Wiesenthal is a skilled raconteur - in

fact an erstwhile professional stand-up comic - so that it is inconceivable that he would weaken

a story, drain it of its significance, by turning a knock-out into a mere slap. With his

training as a stand-up comic, however, it is conceivable that he would turn a slap into a

knock-out.

Mr. Wiesenthal's stories are cluttered with this sort of self-contradiction. Take, for still

another example, the case of the Bodnar rescue: In Justice Not Vengeance, Bodnar saves only

Wiesenthal, and takes him to his apartment. In The Wiesenthal File, however, Bodnar saves

Wiesenthal together with another prisoner and takes the two to the office of a "commissar" which

office they spend the entire night cleaning.

And on top of outright contradiction, there are a mass of details that fail to ring true. For

example, although many Ukrainians did risk their lives to save Jews, the number who knowingly

gave their lives to save Jews must have been considerably smaller - and yet, as noted above,

that is what Wiesenthal seems to be asking us to believe that Bodnar did. And then too,

Wiesenthal tells us that in the execution which he had just barely escaped, the prisoners were

being shot with each standing beside his own wooden box, and dumped into his own box after he

was shot - where we might have expected the executioners to follow the path of least effort, Mr.

Wiesenthal's account shows them going to the trouble of providing each victim with a makeshift

coffin.

And just how did it come to pass that the executioners stopped before killing Wiesenthal

himself? - According to Simon Wiesenthal, they heard church bells, and being devoutly religious,

stopped to pray. But what an incongruous juxtaposition - Ukrainians at once deeply Christian

and deeply genocidal. If Christianity invited the murder of Jews, then this would make sense,

but in fact - in modern times at least - Christianity has stood against such practices, and more

emphatically so in Ukraine than perhaps anywhere else, as we have already noted above.

But what has Mr. Wiesenthal's inability to come up with a consistent or credible biography got

to do with the quality of his professional denunciations? - The evidence suggests that the two

are equally shoddy. Had 60 Minutes looked into Mr. Wiesenthal's professional background, it

would quickly have found much to wonder at. It would, for one thing, have quickly come across

the case of Frank Walus, The Nazi Who Never Was.

Frank Walus: The Nazi Who Never Was

In 1976 Simon Wiesenthal, in Vienna, had gone public with charges that a Polish

emigre living in Chicago, Frank Walus, had been a collaborator involved in

persecuting Polish Jews, including women and children, as part of a Gestapo-led

auxiliary police unit. Walus, charged Wiesenthal, "performed his duties with

the Gestapo in the ghettos of Czestochowa and Kielce and handed over numerous

Jews to the Gestapo." (Charles Ashman Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters,

1988, p. 193)

Walus, in turn, was convicted by judge Julius Hoffman, who

ran the trial with an iron hand and an eccentricity that bordered on the

bizarre. He allowed government witnesses great latitude, while limiting

severely Korenkiewicz's cross-examination of them. When Walus himself

testified, Hoffman limited him almost entirely to simple yes and no answers.

(Charles Ashman Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 193)

Despite weaknesses in the prosecution case, Judge Hoffman went on to convict Walus, and later

despite accumulating evidence of Walus's innocence, refused to reconsider his verdict. But

then a formal appeal was filed. The process took almost two years, but in

February 1980, the court ruled. It threw out Hoffman's verdict and ordered

Walus retried. In making the ruling, the court said that it appeared the

government's case against Walus was "weak" but that Hoffman's handling of the

trial had been so biased that it could not evaluate the evidence properly.

(Charles Ashman Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 195)

In view of irrefutable documentary and eye-witness evidence that Walus had served as a farm

laborer in Germany during the entire war, he was never re-tried. And what, we may ask, was the

occasion for Simon Wiesenthal's fingering Walus in the first place?

Only later was the source of the "evidence" against Walus that had reached

Simon Wiesenthal identified. Walus had bought a two-family duplex when he came

to Chicago. In the early 1970s, he rented out the second unit to a tenant with

whom he eventually had a fight. Walus evicted the tenant, who then started

telling one and all how his former landlord used to sit around and reminisce

about the atrocities he had committed against Jews in the good old days.

Apparently one of the groups to which he told the story was a Jewish refugee

agency in Chicago, which passed the information along to Simon Wiesenthal.

(Charles Ashman Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 195)

For a statement concerning the Walus case made by Frank Walus himself, please read Frank Walus's

letter to Germany.

The Deschenes Commission

But is the Walus case a single slipup in Simon Wiesenthal's otherwise blemish-free career? No,

other slipups can be found - in one instance a batch of 6,000 others. Simon Wiesenthal kicked

the ball into play with the accusation that Canada harbored "several hundred" war criminals

(Toronto Star, May 19, 1971). The Jewish Defense League caught the ball, found it soft and

inflated it to "maybe 1,000" (Globe and Mail, July 5, 1983) before tossing it to Edward

Greenspan. Edward Greenspan mustered enough hot air to inflate it to 2,000 (Globe and Mail,

November 21, 1983) before tossing it to Sol Littman whose lung capacity was able to raise it to

3,000 (Toronto Star, November 8, 1984). The ball, distended beyond recognition, was tossed back

to Wiesenthal who boldly puffed it up to 6,000 (New York Daily News, May 16, 1986) and then made

the mistake of trying to kick it - but poof! The ball burst!

Judge Jules Deschenes writing the report for Canada's Commission on War Criminals first

certifies that the ball had indeed reached the record-breaking 6,000 Canadian war criminals:

The Commission has ascertained from the New York Daily News that this figure is

correct and is not the result of a printing error. (Jules Deschenes,

Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986, p. 247)

But now the big ball was gone, and all that was left was the deflated pigskin which Mr.

Wiesenthal lamely flopped on the Commission's table - a list of 217 names (which in other places

becomes a list of 218 or 219 names). The list was focussed on Ukrainians - Mr. Wiesenthal's

Vienna Documentation Center Annual Report for 1984 claimed that "218 former Ukrainian officers

of Hitler's S.S. (elite guard), which ran death camps in Eastern Europe, are living in Canada."

Upon subjecting the deflated ball to close and prolonged scrutiny, Judge Deschenes, arrived at

the following conclusions:

Between 1971 and 1986, public statements by outside interveners concerning

alleged war criminals residing in Canada have spread increasingly large and

grossly exaggerated figures as to their estimated number ... [among them] the

figure of 6,000 ventured in 1986 by Mr. Simon Wiesenthal.... (p. 249)

The high level reached by some of those figures, together with the wide

discrepancy between them, contributed to create both revulsion and

interrogation. (p. 245)

It was obvious that the list of 217 officers of the Galicia Division furnished

by Mr. Wiesenthal was nearly totally useless and put the Canadian government,

through the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] and this Commission, to a

considerable amount of purposeless work. (p. 258)

The Commission has tried repeatedly to obtain the incriminating evidence

allegedly in Mr. Wiesenthal's possession, through various oral and written

communications with Mr. Wiesenthal himself and with his solicitor, Mr. Martin

Mendelsohn of Washington, D.C., but to no avail: telephone calls, letters, even

a meeting in New York between Mr. Wiesenthal and Commission Counsel on 1

November 1985 followed up by further direct communications, have succeeded in

bringing no positive results, outside of promises. (p. 257)

From the conclusions of the Deschenes Commission alone, 60 Minutes might have decided that Simon