Nazi Hunter by Alan Levy Page A

for control ofpostwar Poland: Stalin had allowed his Polish
prisoners of war – taken by the Red Army between 1939 and 1941, when Russia and Germany were allies – to form a military corps under General Wladyslaw Anders which fought with
distinction against the Germans. But the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile in London had broken relations earlier in 1943 over a German revelation which, for once, was all too true:
in a forest near the Polish village of Katyn, the Germans had found the mass grave of some 4250 Polish officers massacred by the Russians in 1939. 13 In eastern Poland almost five years later, there were two main underground groups fighting the Germans: The Polish National Resistance Movement, or Home Army (
Armja
Krajowa
, known by its initials
A.K.
), supported from and by England, and more nationalistic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Soviet than
A.L.
, the People’s Army, which was
supported by the Russians. Nevertheless,
A.K.
and
A.L.
didn’t fight each other. But, says Wiesenthal, ‘there were also partisan groups which were friendly with the
Germans. One was
UPA
, the Ukrainian Partisan Army. It had support from the German Army to fight other partisans. It was anti-Soviet and it received its equipment from the
Germans.’
    Wiesenthal, whose rescuers were from the pro-Soviet
A.L.
partisans, says that ‘most of our battles were against
UPA
. But there were cases when our group was bombarded by
Soviet planes, since the circumstances in this area were such that we were concentrated there together with four or five other partisan groups. There was such confusion by January of 1944 that no
one knew who was with who and who was fighting who. Whoever stuck his head out of the forest got shot at.’
    While Simon was in hiding with the
A.L.
partisans in the area between Lemberg and Tarnopol, 14 a Hungarian division and the Ukrainian SS
Division ‘Galicia’ and a Ukrainian auxiliary policedivision were combing the woods for partisans. As in Vietnam years later and perhaps in all wars throughout
history, the body-counts to headquarters often seemed more important than the actual results. ‘Quite often,’ Simon recalls, ‘a group from the Field Police, the Ukrainian auxiliary
police, would come up to the edge of the forest. Then fifty men would go in about a hundred metres [110 yards], shoot off a few rounds – and then we would receive a report that about a
hundred partisans had been killed and ten bunkers had been discovered.’
    Toward the end of 1943, the Germans liquidated much of the Janowskà concentration camp. Most of the prisoners were shot, but others fled. As the Gestapo scoured the countryside for them,
Simon had to leave his attic in Kulparkow and join the A.L. partisans, who didn’t mind having Jews in their ranks if they could help. Two Jews, Tanenbaum and Mogely, were already there
– until early 1944, when they were ‘sent to Biasky, a village nearby,’ Simon explains, ‘to see a friendly farmer who kept a supply of food [and] to deliver money. We had to
pay in dollars.’
    The idea of dollars circulating in the backwoods of Nazi-occupied Poland in 1944 astounds his listener, but Simon ploughs on:
    ‘The Russian partisans had dollars, as a rule: one-hundred-dollar bills. We buried at least seventy or eighty thousand dollars. In any case, our Russian liaison man who was with us was
always well supplied with dollars. Even if one had to pay only twenty dollars, a hundred would be paid, with no change in return. The Polish zloty was worthless: just like now. But Mogely and
Tanenbaum were caught and we found them two days later with their eyes gouged out and their tongues cut off, and one of them appeared to have had his genitals worked over with a wire.’
    Together with the farmer with whom they traded, they had been caught by the Secret Field Police or Ukrainian auxiliaries. ‘As the farmer’s widow told us later on,’ Simon
remembers, ‘the Secret Field