Nazi Hunter by Alan Levy Page B

Police first brought her husband before a field court and then to Lemberg, where he was shot dead.’
    This was a more merciful death than Mogely’s and Tanenbaum’s or those of three hostages Simon says ‘a neighbouring group of us once liberated’ from German Army capture:
‘The three persons had been forced into a very little room. For seventy-two hours, they did not get anything to eat. This room was in a farm wheresausage was being
smoked and dried. The three people were in this room while the stove was constantly heated, so that there was a temperature of over fifty degrees Celsius [122° F] in this room. We found these
three men in a condition so that they were like boiled. One of them lived for another five days. The other two were unconscious and never came out of it. A doctor gave the living person several
injections and treated him with water, but it was no use.’
    In February of 1944, Wiesenthal goes on, ‘our group was encircled. It was hopeless to stay there, for the Germans were approaching from all sides. During one night, we decided to split up
into as many parts as possible by dividing into groups . . . Four of us made our way through and arrived together in Lemberg. We entered the apartment of a Pole, pistols in hand, but he
wasn’t in. So we helped ourselves to his civilian clothes there, and left in pairs, forty metres [44 yards] apart.’
    The only partisan address they had in Lemberg was that of the liaison man for
A.K.
the pro-British, but anti-Semitic, underground group: ‘
A.K.
did accept Jews in Lemberg
all the same because the pressure of the Germans was much stronger there than in any other territory. So the
A.K.
liaison man did offer an apartment to the four of us belonging to friends
who were in the field.’ His Gentile comrades accepted the invitation, but Simon, feeling uncomfortable about his hosts, went looking for his original escape partner, the circus director
Scheiman.
    Scheiman was still crouching in the closet of his wife, the Ukrainian seamstress. He invited Simon to join him. ‘The next eight days were almost as bad as the concentration camp,’
says Wiesenthal. ‘Scheiman and I spent our days squatting on low stools in the left-hand half of the closet. The other half, filled with clothes, was kept open. Twice, the police came looking
for Scheiman, but when they saw the open closet, they went away again. The air was suffocating in there and we were afraid to cough. A few feet away, Mrs Scheiman’s Gentile customers were
dressing and undressing for their fittings. It was a totally risky situation.’
    Mrs Scheiman wasn’t happy with the situation either, so the two men swallowed their pride and took sanctuary in the
A.K.
apartment, where Simon’s partisan friends had
hollowed out a ‘grave’ – big enough for a pair of people to recline – in the sand beneath the ground floorboards. The two Jewish fugitives spent most of theirtime above the earth, but, whenever there was a search, they would climb into their grave and the Poles would cover them with three boards and a heavy table. Eventually, Scheiman (who
survived the war) couldn’t take this ‘life’ and returned to his wife’s closet. Simon stayed on – savouring the extra elbow room.
    In early June 1944, during a drinking bout in a neighbouring house, a chief inspector of the German railways was beaten and robbed by his Polish companions. A house-to-house police search was
ordered. Simon reburied himself several times and was in his makeshift coffin on Tuesday, 13 June 1944, when more than eight months of cramped and perilous ‘freedom’ came to an end. As
the Gestapo entered the courtyard of the house, the Polish partisans fled, leaving Wiesenthal trapped beneath the earth ‘in a position where I couldn’t even make use of my
weapon.’
    A minute later, he heard heavy boots tramping above. Two Polish detectives – who knew exactly where to look – slid back the table, took away the