ГУЛаг Палестины

numbers which he may have happened to see on a visiting card two years before.

He can list the participants in huge functions, one by one, and he can add what

colour suit each wore. Although he writes up to twenty letters a day, and

receives more than that number, he can, years later, quote key passages from

them and indicate roughly where that letter may be found in a file. ... A

man's civilian occupation, his origins in a particular region, his accent

mentioned by someone - all these stick in Wiesenthal's memory for years. And,

just like a computer, he can call them up at any time.

This permanent readiness of recall means that the horror is not relegated,

as it is with most people (and increasingly also with victims), to a remote

recess of the mind, but is always at the forefront, at the painful boundary of

consciousness. Wiesenthal possesses what is usually called a photographic

memory: he is a man who ca

Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, pp. 20-21.)

But from someone in Mr. Wiesenthal's position, one expects no less one expects just such

exactitude as he is gifted with, just such precision, just such vivid and accurate recall of

detail. All such things are essential when one is entrusted with the grave responsibility of

accusing individuals and ascribing guilt to nations. And precise memory of such events is to be

expected all the more of someone who was young when the events occurred, and when the events

were traumatic and seared into his memory.

As Mr. Wiesenthal has related the story of his life to more than one biographer, it is not a

difficult matter for a reader to compare these stories in order to be further edified by the

demonstration of Mr. Wiesenthal's remarkable memory. Take, for example, this other account of

the same story of being discovered underneath the floorboards:

One evening in April 1943 a German soldier was shot dead in the street. The

alarm was raised: SS and Polish police officers in civilian clothes searched

the nearby houses for hidden weapons. Instead they found Simon Wiesenthal. He

was marched off for the third time to, as he believed, his certain execution.

(Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p.

11)

But this parallel version of the story is not precisely what the claims concerning Mr.

Wiesenthal's memory led us to expect. The astonishingly accurate "Tuesday, 13 June 1944" has

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 ru

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 ca

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.