Simon Wiesenthal Survivor

Simon Wiesenthal survived four and a half years in five concentration camps and lost eighty nine members of his extended family in the Holocaust. The survivor and the Nazi hunter are sometimes treated as the same person, and the work of the second was made possible by the experience of the first; but the two are distinct biographical and intellectual matters. This page is about the survivor. The hunter has his own page in the Trials section.

Buczacz, 1908 to 1939

Simon Wiesenthal was born on 31 December 1908 in Buczacz, a small town in eastern Galicia in what was then the Habsburg Empire and is now western Ukraine. The town’s Jewish community had numbered around 7,000 in the late nineteenth century and had produced, by the time of his birth, the writers Shmuel Yosef Agnon and Alfred Döblin among others. Wiesenthal’s father Asher was a wholesale sugar dealer who was killed serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1915. His mother Rosa raised him and his younger brother Hillel.

Wiesenthal trained as an architect, taking his diploma at the Czech Technical University in Prague in 1932 after the antisemitic quotas at the Lviv Polytechnic had blocked his initial application. He returned to Lviv (then Lwów in Polish, now in Ukraine) and ran a small architectural practice, designing houses for the modest professional middle class of inter-war Polish Galicia. In 1936 he married Cyla Müller, a distant relative of his on his mother’s side. Their daughter Paulinka was born in 1946; Cyla and Simon would have no other children. Hillel, his younger brother, was killed in 1939 at the start of the war; he had been called up by the Polish army and was lost in the September fighting.

Janowska, 1941 to 1944

The Soviet occupation of Lwów in September 1939 had forced Wiesenthal into hiding because he was, in Soviet eyes, a bourgeois professional. He survived the period working in a bedspring factory under a false name. The German occupation of June 1941 destroyed the Lwów Jewish community in a series of operations of which the most notorious were the Petlura Days pogrom in late July 1941 (carried out by Ukrainian nationalist auxiliaries with German encouragement, killing around 6,000 Jews in three days) and the systematic ghettoisation that followed. Wiesenthal and Cyla were forced into the Lwów ghetto in November 1941, then transferred in early 1942 to the Janowska forced-labour camp on the western outskirts of the city.

Janowska held around 100,000 prisoners over its existence and killed around 80,000 of them; it was a camp of mass shootings rather than gas chambers, and the killing was done in the sand pits behind the camp. Wiesenthal worked in the Eastern Railway Repair Works (Ostbahn-Ausbesserungswerke) under SS supervision. Cyla, who could pass as Polish on her papers, was smuggled out of the camp in 1942 with the help of the Polish Home Army and survived the rest of the war in hiding in Warsaw and the surrounding countryside under the false name of Irena Kowalska. Wiesenthal believed her dead until they were reunited in late 1945. He attempted to commit suicide twice during the camp years.

The five-camp progression, 1944 to 1945

As the Red Army approached Lviv in the summer of 1944, the Janowska prisoners were marched west. Around 200 prisoners survived the march in the column Wiesenthal was on. He passed through Plaszów in southern Poland (the camp commanded by Amon Göth, depicted later in Schindler’s List), where the prisoner population was being liquidated through transports to Auschwitz. He was sent on to Gross-Rosen in Lower Silesia, where the work was quarrying granite under conditions designed to kill. From Gross-Rosen he was marched, in February 1945, to Buchenwald in central Germany. From Buchenwald, in April 1945, he was put on the death-march transport to Mauthausen in upper Austria.

The transport to Mauthausen took several days in open coal wagons. Of the around 6,000 prisoners loaded at Buchenwald, fewer than 2,000 reached Mauthausen alive. Wiesenthal was one of them. He weighed forty seven kilos at liberation, was suffering from typhus, and was among the prisoners the American 11th Armored Division found in barrack 6 of Mauthausen on 5 May 1945. The American medical officers gave him days to live. He recovered.

The eighty nine

The figure of eighty nine family members lost in the Holocaust is Wiesenthal’s own count, given in interviews and in his writings. It included his mother Rosa, deported from Lviv to Belzec in August 1942 and killed there; cousins, uncles, aunts on both sides of the family from Buczacz, Lviv and the surrounding small towns; Cyla’s parents and siblings, killed in the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. The figure is unusual in its specificity for a survivor of the eastern killings; most survivors of the Galician communities never reached a final figure because the records were too fragmentary. Wiesenthal, with his archival temperament, produced one.

The survivor’s writing

Wiesenthal’s principal autobiographical works are three. The Murderers Among Us (1967) is a structured account of his survival and the early years of his post-war work, written with the German journalist Joseph Wechsberg. The Sunflower (1969) is a single chapter from the camp years expanded into a meditation on the question of forgiveness; it describes a young SS officer dying of his wounds in a Lviv military hospital where Wiesenthal had been brought to do labour, who asked Wiesenthal for the forgiveness of a Jew before his death, and whom Wiesenthal left without answering. The book has been continuously in print since publication and is widely used in religious and ethical teaching. Justice Not Vengeance (1989), published when he was eighty, is the late-life autobiography that addresses the question of what the survival had been for.

The survivor stance in Wiesenthal’s writing is distinctive. He refused both vengeance and forgiveness as the dominant frames. The work he chose to do after the war was, he said repeatedly, neither an act of revenge nor a path to reconciliation, but a duty owed to the dead to put on the historical record what had been done to them and by whom. The position is central to The Sunflower‘s open question and is the through-line of all three books.

What the survival meant

Wiesenthal lived to the age of ninety six, dying in Vienna on 20 September 2005. Cyla had died eight months earlier. The Documentation Centre he had founded in Linz in 1947 and moved to Vienna in 1961 closed shortly after his death; its archives were transferred to the Jewish Museum Vienna and the Wiesenthal Center records held in Los Angeles, the related but distinct American institution founded in 1977. The Wiener Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, established in Vienna in 2010 in his name, continues research on the records he assembled.

The survivor work and the hunter work were the same person, but the relationship between them is the question Wiesenthal himself put at the centre of his late writing. The hunter without the survivor would not have understood what was being looked for. The survivor without the hunter would have been one of the great many who lived out their lives in silence. Wiesenthal chose neither.

See also

Sources

  • Simon Wiesenthal, The Murderers Among Us: The Wiesenthal Memoirs, McGraw-Hill, 1967
  • Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Schocken, 1969 (revised symposium edition 1997)
  • Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, Grove Weidenfeld, 1989
  • Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, Doubleday, 2010 (the standard biography, drawing on the Wiesenthal archive opened after his death)
  • Hella Pick, Simon Wiesenthal: A Life in Search of Justice, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996
  • Eli Rosenbaum, Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up, St. Martin’s Press, 1993 (on the Waldheim affair, including Wiesenthal’s contested role)
  • Wiener Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Vienna, archive materials, https://www.vwi.ac.at
  • Simon Wiesenthal Archive, Vienna, https://www.simon-wiesenthal-archiv.at
  • USHMM oral history collection, “Simon Wiesenthal”, https://collections.ushmm.org