Nazi Hunter Read Online Free Page B

Wiesenthal’s French literary agent, Charles Ronsac, sold
Sails of Hope
to six European publishers and Macmillan in America (1973), an editor in the New York office objected
facetiously: ‘The Italian Mafia will kill us!’ and Wiesenthal said: ‘After this book is published, all Jews will have three holidays: Rosh Hashonah, Yom Kippur, and Columbus
Day.’
    Actually, the only problem came in Spain, where a Wiesenthal reference to three Franco families who sailed to the New World in 1510 was punctuated with: ‘Franco was a common Jewish name in
the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.’ This did not sit well with the fascist dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1892–1975) and
Sails of Hope
was
banned in Spain. Wiesenthal says the reference was no accident and was, in fact, his way of thanking Franco for his reluctance to repatriate Jewish refugees who escaped to Spain during the war.
    During my dialogues with Wiesenthal, I wondered what the Hebrew interpreter Luis de Torres, who was the first member of the expedition to set foot in the New World, might have said to the
‘Indians’ when the
Pinta
,
Nina
, and
Santa Maria
landed in the Bahamas on 12 October 1492: ‘Did he address them in Hebrew?’
    ‘That I don’t know,’ Simon said, adding deadpan, ‘But I can tell you what the Indians said back to the white man: “Now begins the
tsuris
.”’ 7

2
The many liberations of Szymon Wiesenthal
    When Simon Wiesenthal turned ninety on 31 December 1998, many well-wishers thought he had already been eighty all year because his date of birth was in 1908 – but barely.
Bare is how he was born half an hour before midnight on New Year’s Eve 1908 in his parents’ bedroom in the small town of Buczacz (pronounced
Boo-tchotch
) in Galicia, then the
eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now the western part of the Ukrainian republic. ‘Through half an hour, I am older by a year,’ he says with a laugh whenever an
interviewer, subtracting 1908 from the present, overestimates his age. When the midwife emerged with the news that a healthy boy was born, Asher Wiesenthal opened a bottle of schnapps and, with a
handful of relatives and neighbours, toasted a particularly Happy New Year.
    The midwife dutifully registered Szymon’s birth in the town office, but his superstitious maternal grandfather, believing that 1909’s first-born would win God’s special favour,
took the liberty of also enrolling him at the top of the new year’s book of life. The old man’s wife was something of a mystic, as befits a woman whose maiden name was Freud. She liked
to take her grandchild on outings to various ‘miracle rabbis’ of Galicia and have special blessings bestowed upon the boy. ‘All my education before school was my
grandmother,’ Simon recalls, ‘with her stories of rabbis and miracles. Through this education, I not only tend to think in a Talmudic way, but I can always reason with rabbis and other
religious people because I speak their language.’
    The map of Europe in 1909 was vastly different from (and in some ways similar to) the Continent we know now. There were no countries called Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, but there were pricklynations known as Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. Albania was a monarchy and Bulgaria and Romania were major powers. Poland was part of Russia, though the city of Cracow was
Austro-Hungarian. Austrian might extended from the Alps southward into Italy (a vestige of the Habsburg dynasty’s reign until 1806 as Holy Roman Emperors) and nearly a thousand miles eastward
from Vienna. With the annexation of Bosnia and Herzogovina a few weeks before Szymon was born, Austria – already a formidable naval force through its port of Trieste – ruled the
Adriatic.
    In the Austrian crown-land of Galicia – with its 1,700,000 Ukrainians, 1,000,000 Poles, and 800,000 Jews – smouldering tensions enabled the Viennese Habsburgs to divide and rule with