Chasing bloodhounds ... Lest we Forget

Vienna. September 20, 2005. Simon Wiesenthal is dead.

Vienna. End of 1994. I am at the door of an unremarkable building. It houses a most remarkable movement. The Jewish Documentation Centre. One rings the bell. A female voice answers. One picks up the courage to say, “I want to meet Mr.

Simon Wiesenthal.”

The answer is a crisp, “This place is not open to the public.”

“I am not public.”

There is a short laugh. The door is opened. A starchy woman manages half a smile, but will only permit a quick look. Files are piled up. It is a neat room. Is this the place where one man had been conducting a crusade for so many decades? Was that man about emotions or clinical precision?

Not being able to meet him was the stimulus to finding out more…


He will not let them forget. The lashings, the humiliation, the depravity. He will not let them forget: he writes to presidents, follows up on the cases, sometimes for decades, and waits for “justice, not vengeance” to take its course.

Simon Wiesenthal’s life, even today, is like a veritable thriller without the thrills, for every moment is painful catharsis. It is only now, some 40 years after his initiation as Nazi hunter that the government of Austria recognised his work in tracking down all the criminals of the Holocaust.

On Austria’s national day he was honoured with the highest service medal and a film on his life was screened on state-run television. But this occasion too did not go without its moments of suspense as important files on ex-Nazis disappeared.

This must have been a very professional operation, for Wiesenthal is known to be the only person who the witnesses trust with information. Ever since he set up his Documentation Centre in Vienna in 1961 (after shutting down an earlier office in Linz) he gets hundreds of people who wish to provide tip-offs. The sources are never revealed which is why they prefer to talk to him rather than the police.

A typical case the Centre is involved in would be of Dr. Ariburt Heim who used 540 inmates of a concentration camp as guinea pigs and gave them the special treatment that included amputation of healthy prisoners, the slitting of their abdomens and leaving them to die. On one occasion he picked out two prisoners with perfect set of teeth, took them to his office and killed them with a poisonous injection. He then decapitated the corpses, had the heads boiled and cleaned, and finally decorated his desk with one of the skulls; he presented the other one to a friend.

Wiesenthal followed up the case right up until the late 70s and saw to it that Heim’s source of income was cut off, but the doctor had himself disappeared. It was discovered only two decades later that he was dead without meeting with justice in a court of law that Wiesenthal would have preferred.

Who is Simon Wiesenthal and why is he gunning after the Nazis? He is first and foremost a survivor of those dark days of Hitler who lost 89 members of his own and his wife’s family. In his words, “I have spent my entire life remembering and reminding the world of the consequences of indifference and silence. And now I ask myself: can it be that all my efforts in over four decades of work have been in vain? Of course one cannot compare what is happening now with Nazi times. But even if only a part of what we hear through the news media or what I have learned by talking to trustworthy people who have been in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Croatia and have been directly affected by what is happening there, even if only a part of all that is true…it comes from a school of bestiality. This drive towards evil together with a sense of impunity has led to veritable orgies of brutality that remind me of the occurrences in the Nazi concentration camps.”

For you and I, a Nazi concentration camp is a place where they sent off a lot of Jews to die. That is all. But unless we comprehend the cruelty instead of being mere recipients of sound bytes, we will never be able to fully understand a man like Wiesenthal and why a person would give a better part of his life in chasing bloodhounds.

For a closer look far removed from those horrendous days, I went to Dachau, the first concentration camp of the Third Reich which was opened on March 22, 1933. As Heinrich Himmler, the commissioner of police, announced then, “We have adopted this measure, undeterred by paltry scruples; in the conviction that our action will help to restore calm to our country and is in the best interests of our people.”

Dachau stands witness to the unspeakable horrors of the Dark Cell, the Standing Cell and other sadistic delights that the German officers found themselves enjoying for 12 years. And even when the doors were forced open in 1945, a clever cover-up job was done by the perpetrators of the crimes. Dr. Johannes Neuhausler, an auxiliary bishop who had been ‘cooled off’, realised that fear prevented people from telling the truth. “Evil loves the darkness and hates the light”.

What did happen in this concentration camp that was 990 feet wide and 1,980 feet long with a neutral zone that had a ditch and was surrounded by a canal and electrically-charged wires?

A camp that could accommodate no more than 5,000 prisoners always had at least 12,000 with the numbers increasing to 30,000 in the last months. Hunger was a perennial problem and sometimes those in transit were starved upto 15 days. On arrival vehicles often had corpses with the flesh gnawed out, the bones bare. As one recorded statement says, “This was done not by animals but by famished comrades. Cannibalism in the year 1942 in Central Europe!”

Weakened and demoralised they had to go through severe and humiliating forms of punishment that included lashes, punching one another, being made to stand in severe weather for hours or being tied to the stake. The prized prisoners were those with gold fillings in their teeth. After they were killed by the nurses their mouths were prised open and the gold shared.

The living conditions were naturally appalling. Mattresses were full of lice and fleas. Some of the prisoners were so ill they could not get up to answer nature’s call and it was not uncommon to find excrement from the upper bunkers falling on those below.

To worsen matters, there was uncertainty. No one knew how long they would live and death never did come as a relief. It came ominously, teasing, taunting. The stench from the corpses reminded others not of mortality but helplessness. The distinguished among the prisoners were paraded naked to provide laughter for the officers who tired of their earlier entertainment of making plaster moulds of those with bodily defects.

But has the entertainment stopped? Has Dachau not remained a rendezvous for tourists? Despite all the requests for silence, for being appropriately dressed, for trying to understand the immensity of what we were face-to-face with, wasn’t there a sort of carnival atmosphere with quarrelsome Italians, squawking Americans and almost everyone waiting with voyeuristic delight for the happening to unfold, an edge-of-the-seat excitement over the gassing of thousands of people? One is not being cynical, but how many of the touristy tears could really make a difference?

According to the man who should know, it does. Said Wiesenthal, “For many decades it was a lonely fight…surrounded by a curtain woven from two sides: by those could not forget even if they wanted to and by those who did not want to be reminded. About eight years ago a change set in; this was brought about mainly by young people – and that is something that gives some reason to hope.”

To uphold idealism after 40 years of banging your head against several walls requires courage. Wiesenthal has not sold out to the forces of change; he has merely adapted to them. In Los Angeles there is a Museum of Tolerance named after him. There are two doors marked ‘Prejudiced’ and ‘Unprejudiced’ with the latter one locked. The visitor then begins the tour of the Holocaust by receiving a passport card of a child survivor or victim whose personal story is revealed on the journey inside.

It is, of course, a superficial exploration, but that is often our only link with a past not our own. For Wiesenthal it is not about today’s people having to shoulder the blame but if they are left ignorant of gruesome history they will never know the truth about the world they have been born into.

He will not let them forget that hell can be on earth. It is their destiny as much as it is his.