Settling Old Scores, Again

By Otto Friedrich

JUSTICE, NOT VENGEANCE

by Simon Wiesenthal

Grove Weidenfeld

372 pages; $22.50

When Simon Wiesenthal wrote his memoirs more than 20 years ago, with considerable help from Joseph Wechsberg of the New Yorker, he had a highly dramatic story to tell: how he had emerged from an Austrian concentration camp in 1945 and devoted the rest of his life to catching Nazi criminals; how he had helped to hunt down some, like Adolf Eichmann; and how others still remained, as he titled his book, The Murderers Among Us.

At 80, Wiesenthal decided to tell his story all over again. Though presented as a new book, some of its narratives remain almost exactly the same -- Wiesenthal's pursuit of the police officer who arrested Anne Frank, for example. Others needed updating. In The Murderers Among Us, Wiesenthal located Treblinka Commandant Franz Stangl working at a Volkswagen plant in Sao Paulo; shortly after Wiesenthal's book appeared, Stangl was arrested and sent to prison. On the other hand, Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele, whom Wiesenthal had described as hiding in Paraguay, was subsequently found to have drowned in & Brazil (though Wiesenthal continues to suspect that he is still alive).

Wiesenthal's new editorial collaborators do not serve his purposes well. Instead of benefiting from Wechsberg's competent prose, this new autobiography has been translated from the German by Ewald Osers, and it is studded with Anglicisms like lorries, plimsolls, doing a bunk and getting the stick. And though the publishers exaggeratedly claim that Wiesenthal "engineered" the Eichmann capture, Wiesenthal himself says only that his effort to prevent Eichmann's wife from having Eichmann declared legally dead "was probably my most important contribution to the Eichmann case."

While The Murderers Among Us had a clear thesis, coolly pursued, Wiesenthal's new memoir rambles through whole chapters on such marginal topics as whether Hitler had syphilis. And like some other memoirists in their 80s, Wiesenthal has lots of scores that he wants to settle. He is angry not only at all the ex-Nazis and all the authorities who have sheltered them in Germany, Austria, Latin America and the Middle East but also at the U.S. for recruiting killers like Klaus Barbie for cold war intelligence, and at the Soviets for all their political crimes (it was at their hands that Wiesenthal's father died).

Wiesenthal also criticizes Israeli secret-service chief Isser Harel, whose memoirs did not mention Wiesenthal's contributions to the capture of Eichmann. (The story of that raid is vividly told in a new memoir by the actual capturer, Eichmann in My Hands, by Peter Z. Malkin and Harry Stein, to be published in May by Warner Books.) Other Wiesenthal targets include former Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, a Jewish Socialist, for including four ex- Nazis in his first Cabinet, and Elie Wiesel, for not including a Gypsy on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

There is clearly a lot to be angry about, but it is a little odd for Wiesenthal to title his rancorous book Justice, Not Vengeance. One can argue that vengeance is a private reprisal, whereas justice comes from an impartial authority, but the two seem very tightly (and understandably) intertwined in the mind of Simon Wiesenthal.