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.
But what has Mr. Wiesenthal's inability to come up with a consistent or credible biography got
to do with the quality of his professional denunciations? - The evidence suggests that the two
are equally shoddy. Had 60 Minutes looked into Mr. Wiesenthal's professional background, it
would quickly have found much to wonder at. It would, for one thing, have quickly come across
the case of Frank Walus, The Nazi Who Never Was.
Frank Walus: The Nazi Who Never Was
In 1976 Simon Wiesenthal, in Vienna, had gone public with charges that a Polish
emigre living in Chicago, Frank Walus, had been a collaborator involved in
persecuting Polish Jews, including women and children, as part of a Gestapo-led
auxiliary police unit. Walus, charged Wiesenthal, "performed his duties with
the Gestapo in the ghettos of Czestochowa and Kielce and handed over numerous
Jews to the Gestapo." (Charles Ashman Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters,
1988, p. 193)
Walus, in turn, was convicted by judge Julius Hoffman, who
ran the trial with an iron hand and an eccentricity that bordered on the
bizarre. He allowed government witnesses great latitude, while limiting
severely Korenkiewicz's cross-examination of them. When Walus himself
testified, Hoffman limited him almost entirely to simple yes and no answers.
(Charles Ashman Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 193)
Despite weaknesses in the prosecution case, Judge Hoffman went on to convict Walus, and later
despite accumulating evidence of Walus's innocence, refused to reconsider his verdict. But
then a formal appeal was filed. The process took almost two years, but in
February 1980, the court ruled. It threw out Hoffman's verdict and ordered
Walus retried. In making the ruling, the court said that it appeared the
government's case against Walus was "weak" but that Hoffman's handling of the
trial had been so biased that it could not evaluate the evidence properly.
(Charles Ashman Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 195)
In view of irrefutable documentary and eye-witness evidence that Walus had served as a farm
laborer in Germany during the entire war, he was never re-tried. And what, we may ask, was the
occasion for Simon Wiesenthal's fingering Walus in the first place?
Only later was the source of the "evidence" against Walus that had reached
Simon Wiesenthal identified. Walus had bought a two-family duplex when he came
to Chicago. In the early 1970s, he rented out the second unit to a tenant with
whom he eventually had a fight. Walus evicted the tenant, who then started
telling one and all how his former landlord used to sit around and reminisce
about the atrocities he had committed against Jews in the good old days.
Apparently one of the groups to which he told the story was a Jewish refugee
agency in Chicago, which passed the information along to Simon Wiesenthal.
(Charles Ashman Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 195)
For a statement concerning the Walus case made by Frank Walus himself, please read Frank Walus's
letter to Germany.
