Free Nazi Hunter by Alan Levy

cleansed of one’s sins against other mortals through sincere repentance alone. One must first
obtain the forgiveness of those one has wronged before asking divine mercy. Even God Himself can only forgive sins committed against Himself, not against man – and certainly not against
mankind!
    In the New Testament, too, the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew VI: 9–13) asks forgiveness not just for our trespasses, but for those who trespass against us and, earlier in the Book of
Matthew (V:23), Jesus says: ‘If thou bring thine offering to the altar and thou remember there that thy brother has aught against thee, leave thy offering there before the altar, and go,
first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and bring thine offering.’
    Only God, still on leave, might have known how many priestly confessors as well as postwar courts would grant absolution to Nazi mass murderers who expressed guilt or did minor penance for sins
that surpassed all biblical reckoning.
    Two and a half years later, in the death barracks of the concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria, Simon broached his dilemma to a bunkmate named Bolek, a Polish Catholic who had been studying
for the priesthood in Warsaw when the Germans shipped him to Auschwitz. Simon’s summary concluded with a barrage of questions: ‘What do you think I should have done? Should I have
forgiven him? Did I have any right to forgive him? What does your religion say? What would you have done in my position?’
    After some thought, Bolek replied: ‘I don’t think the attitude of the great religions to the question of forgiveness differs to any great extent. If there is any difference, then
it’s more in practice than in principle. One thing is certain: you can only forgive a wrong that has been done to yourself. Yet, on the other hand: where would the SS man turn? None of those
he’d wronged were still alive.’
    ‘So he asked something from me that was impossible to give?’ Simon asked hopefully.
    ‘Probably he turned to you because he regarded Jews as a single condemned community,’ Bolek surmised, going on to concludethat since he ‘showed signs of
repentance, genuine, sincere repentance for his misdeeds . . . then he deserved the mercy of forgiveness from you.’
    They argued this point from then until parting – a few days after liberation on 5 May 1945, when Bolek headed home to Poland and
his
God. The more they talked, says Simon, the
more ‘Bolek began to falter in his original opinion . . . and for my part I became less and less certain that I had acted properly.’

5
When a Jew chooses to die
    It was Simon Wiesenthal’s good fortune that he spent most of the war imprisoned in his own home city of Lemberg without being shipped from the Janowskà
concentration camp to Sobibor, Belzec, or any of the nearby extermination camps that took the lives of his mother and eighty-eight other relatives. Whenever he was working as a sign-painter at the
Eastern Railroad Repair Works, which was most of the time, he had the chance to see his wife, Cyla, polishing nickel and brass in the locomotive workshop. But, in between rounds at the railway
works, he was sometimes yanked back to Janowskà, where he had to look at the broad and beaming face of the deputy camp commandant, Lieutenant Richard Rokita, a chunky Silesian in his late
thirties who used to be a café violinist.
    ‘We called Rokita “the friendly murderer”,’ Wiesenthal recalls. ‘He never beat anybody. He never screamed at us. He just shot prisoners politely. One day, Rokita
goes strolling through the camp and sees an old Jew, too weak to be of any use to the Third Reich. The old man salutes him. Rokita greets him cheerfully, drops a piece of paper, and tells the old
Jew to pick it up. When the old man bends down, Rokita shoots him dead. Like I said, a friendly murderer.’
    Rokita’s pet project was the camp orchestra, which he formed from a wide selection of first-rate musicians imprisoned in