Nazi Hunter by Alan Levy

redistribution. After dressing quickly, he was
escorted back to the railway works where he had started his day an eternity ago.
    Kohlrautz was grinning from ear to ear as he welcomed Simon back. He had been on the phone with Wilhaus, Gebauer, and others to convince them that Wiesenthal was the best man alive in Lemberg to
paint a giant poster – with swastika, white letters, and red background – proclaiming ‘ WIR DANKEN UNSEREM FÜHRER ’ (We Thank Our Leader) for the
birthday celebration.
    ‘You know, Simon,’ said Kohlrautz a few minutes later, ‘it’s not only Hitler’s birthday today, but it’s yours, too.’
    Kohlrautz, who was killed in the battle of Berlin in 1945, never asked any questions about the two pistols he let Simon store in his desk drawer. Simon had obtained them from
the Polish underground cell in the railway works. In his capacity as sign-painter, he had freedom to roam the yards. The Polish resistance figured he might be useful in future sabotage, since their
eventual plan was to blow up the Lemberg railroad junction at a crucial moment. Besides, he was an architect, engineer, and draughtsman who could draw maps pinpointing the most vital and vulnerable
positions. Would he co-operate?
    Yes, said Simon, for a price: his wife’s freedom.
    Cyla Müller Wiesenthal was blonde and could pass for a Pole. The underground smuggled her out of the yards one night and gave her the identity of ‘Irene Kowalska’ with which she
took a morning train to Warsaw and settled into an apartment that waswaiting for her at 5 Topiel Street. Cyla found herself sharing the flat with the wife of the Polish poet
Jerzy Lec, but Mrs Lec was also using a pseudonym, so neither woman knew the other’s identity – or that the other was Jewish, too.
    Still quite sure he wouldn’t survive the war, Simon rejoiced that his wife might. Soon, virtually all Jewish women in ghetto and camp were liquidated, so he knew he had made the right move
for Cyla. Now he had to look after himself. In late September 1943, when word came down that Jewish prisoners who lived at the railway works would soon be spending their nights at Janowskà,
Wiesenthal read between the lines and concluded it would be fatal for him to go back there. Even Kohlrautz kept looking at him and asking: ‘Simon, what are you waiting for?’
    Kohlrautz often sent Simon, guarded by a Ukrainian policeman, into town to buy art supplies and run other errands for him. On Saturday, 2 October 1943, Wiesenthal and Arthur Scheiman, a former
circus director, requested passes to go shopping before the stores closed. Kohlrautz was glad to oblige. While the German boss went looking for a particularly stupid Ukrainian to accompany them,
Wiesenthal and Scheiman fished the two pistols out of Kohlrautz’s drawer. He came back with a real prize: a Ukrainian who was new to Lemberg and didn’t know the city. With a wink, a
wave, and a sly
‘auf Wiedersehen!’
(‘See you again!’), Kohlrautz sent them off to town.
    They visited a stationery store that had front and back entrances. They told their guard to wait for them at the cashier’s desk near the front. Knowing that nobody could leave without
paying, he assented. Then they left by the back door.
    A Polish friend from the underground sheltered them in his apartment for a couple of days. Then Scheiman rejoined his wife, a Ukrainian seamstress, who hid him in her clothes closet by day when
her customers came for fittings. The partisans moved Simon to a nearby village, Kulparkow, where the parents of a Polish girl who worked at the railway yards hid him in the attic of their house.
From this base, he helped the partisans build bunkers and lines of fortification. ‘I was not so much a strategic expert as a technical expert,’ he recalls, telling how he worked closely
with the partisans in the region.
    A little nomenclature is necessary here. By late 1943, two main groups of Poles-in-exile were already competing