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knocked him unconscious. When Wiesenthal woke up, friends had carried him to

his bunk. "What has he got against you?" one of them asked.

"I don't know," Simon said. "Maybe he's angry because I'm still alive."

(Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 69)

These two accounts are so different that one wonders whether they are of the same event. In the

first account Wiesenthal is addressing Rusinek when Rusinek slaps him, while in the second

Rusinek pounces on him, which suggests an ambush. But more important, when you have been

pounced on and knocked unconscious, when you become aware that your friends have carried you to

your bunk only after you have regained consciousness, then you would not ordinarily describe

that as merely having been "struck across the face." Mr. Wiesenthal is a skilled raconteur - in

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