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