Free Nazi Hunter by Alan Levy Page B

masons as they bent down,
working on the brick wall. They must have reminded Wilhaus of the figures 12 used as targets on the shooting-range, for suddenly he took his gun,
aimed carefully, and fired. A man fell. Heike thought this was a wonderful game. She clapped her hands. Papa aimed carefully again and hit another target, killing the man. Then he handed his gun to
his wife and told her to try. She did. Down went the third Jewish mason.’
    On Tuesday, 20 April 1943, Wilhaus decided to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s fifty-fourth birthday by sacrificing fifty-four Jewish intellectuals. There were, however, only some forty
professional men and women left in Janowskà, so Wilhaus ordered a round-up of others who were on work assignments outside the camp. A blank-eyed, slit-mouthed Silesian SS killer named
Richard Dyga was dispatched to fetch Wiesenthal and two other men from the Eastern Railroad Repair Works. Though their German civilian boss, Adolf Kohlrautz, pleaded that he needed them, Dyga
insisted hehad his orders and Kohlrautz bade Wiesenthal farewell with a sorry shrug.
    Along their way back to Janowskà, Dyga rounded up other educated Jews and delivered them all to ‘The Pipe’, where the rest of the camp’s intelligentsia, including a
handful of women, were already assembled, making their peace with life in silence. When attendance was complete, six SS men – one of them carrying a submachine-gun – marched the
prisoners through the barbed-wire corridor, two abreast.
    ‘Each of us walked by himself,’ Wiesenthal recalls. ‘Each of us was alone with himself, with his thoughts. Each was his own island of solitude. That was our privilege, our
strength.’
    An April shower burst as they reached the rim of the sandpit, where they could gaze down at naked corpses from earlier executions. Nearby, a truck waited, its motor running. The new victims were
told to take off all their clothes, fold them neatly, and place them on the truck in individual piles so they could be sorted by size.
    ‘Now one could have no illusions; the end was surely near,’ says Wiesenthal. ‘The Nazis killed you only when you were naked, because they knew, psychologically, that naked
people never resist.’
    The truck drove off with their clothes. The fifty-four naked men and women stood in a single row along the rim as the executioner lifted his submachine-gun and began to move them down with one
burst apiece. After the fifth or sixth shot, there was a brief delay when one man fell backwards on to the ground instead of into the pit. An SS man had to go over and kick him in. Then the
shooting resumed.
    Through the pelting rain, as Wiesenthal waited for the end, he vaguely heard a whistle and some shouts, but the sounds of this earth no longer penetrated his senses. The man next to him,
however, heard the word
‘Wie-sen-thal!’
and, almost as if relaying a phone call, said, ‘It’s for you.’
    Just outside ‘The Pipe’, an SS corporal was asking, ‘Is Wiesenthal in there? Where’s Wiesenthal?’ Simon snapped to attention and said ‘Here!’
    ‘Follow me!’ the corporal commanded and, to Simon’s amazement, led him back out through ‘The Pipe’ for the first and last time any prisoner ever made a round
trip.
    ‘I staggered like a drunk,’ he recalls. The SS corporal had to slap his face twice ‘to bring me back to earth.’
    The executioner, too, was flabbergasted. He was supposed to shoot fifty four people, not fifty-three. ‘What do we do now?’ he asked the corporal.
    ‘Continue!’ the corporal commanded. Before Wiesenthal was out of earshot, fifty-three Jews were dead. He never asked if the SS found a fifty-fourth, but suspects they did. All he
knows is that ‘for a long time, I was the only person I knew in the camps who still believed in miracles.’
    The corporal marched him to a warehouse, where the truck had not yet unloaded his clothing or the fifty-three other piles to be fumigated for