FACES AND PLACES: The Wiesenthal shotgun (05/04/86)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

The Wiesenthal shotgun

For most Jews, Simon Wiesenthal is a hero of legendary proportions, an avenger who has dedicated his life to bringing Nazi war criminals to justice.

For most Ukrainians, Mr. Wiesenthal is an enigma, a man who seemingly rejects the concept of collective guilt and yet heaps abuse on Ukrainians and Balts whose guilt, he now claims, "is bigger than the guilt of the Nazis."

I first met Mr. Wiesenthal during an interview in 1977. He was gracious, and I must admit I was impressed with both the man and his mission. On one entire wall in his Vienna office was a map of Europe covered with Stars of David of various sizes. Each size represented the number of Jews murdered in that part of the continent, smaller stars denoting a few hundred, larger stars hundreds of thousands. "The map," Mr. Wiesenthal told me, "is a daily reminder of the work I still have to do."

Mr. Wiesenthal and I spoke in Ukrainian, a language he speaks with great fluency. He is, after all, a man who grew up in Ukraine and later worked as an architect in Lviv.

After a few preliminary questions about his past, I asked him how he felt about Ukrainians. "I don't like them," was his candid response.

"Why?" I asked.

"You must understand," Mr. Wiesenthal replied. "I grew up with Ukrainians and I believed I had many close friends among them. All of them betrayed me when the Nazis came. They refused to help me and other Jews. They pretended they didn't know me. Later, other Ukrainians helped the Nazis kill Jews."

"Does that mean all Ukrainians are guilty?" I asked.

"Of course not," Mr. Wiesenthal replied. "The line that separates good and evil people runs through all nations, even the Jewish nation. I'm only after the evil ones, not those who committed no crimes."

I questioned Mr. Wiesenthal about his sources suggesting that much of his "evidence" against Ukrainians was Soviet fabrication. "Evidence is evidence," he answered. "Let the courts decide if it is genuine or not."

"Where are these trials to take place?" I asked. "Surely the Soviet Union has no right to try Ukrainians for crimes against Jews given the Soviet record of crimes against all nationalities."

For the first time Mr. Wiesenthal was vague. "I just want war criminals out of the United States," he told me. "I can't sleep nights thinking that murderers enjoy all of the benefits of life in America. I won't rest until I find and expose all of them. If there were those who killed Ukrainians living in the United States you would feel the same way."

Our conversation came to an end and I recall leaving Mr. Wiesenthal's office believing in his basic integrity. This belief was later confirmed when I began to read "The Murderers Among Us," his official memoirs, published in 1967. "A Jew who believes in God and in his people does not believe in collective guilt," Mr. Wiesenthal declared on page 12. "Didn't we Jews suffer for thousands of years because we were said to be collectively guilty - all of us, including the unborn children - of the crucifixion, the epidemics of the Middle Ages, communism, capitalism...we are the eternal scapegoat. We know that we are not collectively guilty, so how can we accuse any other nation, no matter what some of its people have done, of being collectively guilty?"

As I continued to read his memoris further, however, a different Mr. Wiesenthal began to emerge. His treatment of Ukrainians quickly deteriorated into strident generalizations. "The Bolshevik troops were bad," wrote Mr. Wiesenthal in references to his World War I experiences, "but the Ukrainian cavalry bands were worse." Similar generalizations were expressed regarding Mr. Wiesenthal's World War II experiences. "The native Ukrainian population cooperated actively with the Gestapo and the SS," he argued, offering little substantiation or documentation. As for war crimes trials following World War II, Mr. Wiesenthal wrote: "The hardest stand was taken by the Soviets, who summarily arrested both genuine Nazis and people who were denounced as Nazis..." For Mr. Wiesenthal, apparently, the Soviet system of justice which permits immediate arrest of those who have only been called Nazis is laudatory.

Perhaps the most incredible aspect of Mr. Wiesenthal's World War II experience is the fact that he survived at all especially when so many of his Jewish associates perished. In 1939, he claims to have bribed an NKVD commissar and was spared deporation to Siberia along with other "bourgeois" Jews in Galicia. In 1941, he was saved from execution by a Ukrainian auxiliary policeman named Bodnar who spirited him away from the Nazis during the night. Later, Mr. Wiesenthal was singled out of a line of Jews - all of whom were summarily executed minutes later - by an SS officer who later provided him with double food rations. One can't help but wonder if these incidents were really the "miracles" Mr. Wiesenthal claims they were.

Today, Simon Wiesenthal no longer follows the principles he professed in his memoirs in 1967 and to me in 1977. Realizing, perhaps, that time is running out, he has changed tactics. He has adopted the shotgun approach to Nazi hunting, firing indiscriminately at the entire Ukrainian and Baltic communities in the hope of wounding a few alleged "Nazis." I resent Mr. Wiesenthal's consistent references to Ukraine as "the country of pogroms," just as Jews would resent references to Israel as "the land of the Christ-killers."

Having studied Mr. Wiesenthal's recent releases and publications from Vienna and Los Angeles, I am increasingly convinced that he may be collaborating closely with the KGB and that in addition to wanting to live to see the last living Nazi on earth hanged, he appears to have an almost pathological need to discredit the Ukrainian and Baltic communities in the free world.

Mr. Wiesenthal needs to be informed that it is this latter activity of his that our community will continue to expose for the bigoted sham that it is.

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