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December 9, 1994 |
Simon Wiesenthal
I call to your attention the following passage from Alan Levy's
The Wiesenthal File:
Jewish Documentation Center
Vienna, Austria
Dear Mr. Wiesenthal:
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On Tuesday, 20 April 1943, Wilhaus decided to celebrate Adolf
Hitler's fifty-fourth birthday by sacrificing fifty-four Jewish
intellectuals. There were, however, only some forty professional men
and women left in Janowskà, so Wilhaus ordered a round-up of others who
were on work assignments outside the camp. ... When attendance was
complete, six SS men � one of them carrying a submachine-gun � marched the
prisoners through the barbed-wire corridor, two abreast. ... The
fifty-four naked men and women stood in a single row along the rim as
the executioner lifted his submachine-gun and began to mow them down
with one burst apiece. ... "Follow me!" the corporal commanded and, to
Simon's amazement, led him back out through 'The Pipe' for the first and
last time any prisoner ever made a round trip. ... The executioner ...
was flabbergasted. He was supposed to shoot fifty-four people, not
fifty-three. "What do we do now?" he asked the corporal. "Continue!" the corporal commanded. Before Wiesenthal was out of earshot, fifty-three Jews were dead. He never asked if the SS found a fifty-fourth, but suspects they did. ... The corporal marched him to a warehouse, where the truck had not yet unloaded his clothing or the fifty-three other piles to be fumigated for 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. ... "You know, Simon," said Kohlrautz a few minutes later, "it's not only Hitler's birthday today, but it's yours, too." (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, pp. 48-49) |
The above event, I would imagine, makes it next to impossible to
forget how many Jews were executed on the day in question � it is the same
as Hitler's age (though it might be one less). This mnemonic, however,
is not foolproof, as it is still possible to forget exactly how old
Hitler was on that day � it might be possible, for example, to erroneously
imagine that Hitler was 53 that day, or 57. Still, the mnemonic does set
a limit on how deviant any erroneous recollection of the number of Jews
executed that day might be � for example, if we can be certain that Hitler
could not have been 80, we can also be certain that 80 Jews could not
have been executed.
What, then, are we to make of the following account of the same event?
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On 20 April 1943 ... Wiesenthal and three other men were
collected early in the morning.... The SS intended to celebrate the
Führer's birthday with a sacrifice of Jews. Those selected for execution by shooting, about twenty men, were made to stand by the so-called "tube" � a two-metre-wide corridor between barbed wire fences. (Peter Michael Lingens in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 9) |
My hypothesis that any erroneous recollection of the number of
Jews executed on the day in question would be confined within the limits
of Hitler's probable age seems to have been disconfirmed, as we know that
Hitler could not possibly have been twenty.
I wonder if you would care to comment on this discrepancy?
Yours truly,
Lubomyr Prytulak