3 Simon

Appropriately enough the towers began to appear on the horizon like a pair of dunce's caps and grew taller as we cruised along in the van towards them. They were still some distance away, having been for some time the tallest man made structures in the world, but Cologne Cathedral's majestic spires were not a welcome site. 'Cologne is north,' I said. 'We're supposed to be going south towards Munich.'

The autobhan held this northbound grip for half an hour until a side exit eventually released us, and then it was a matter of finding a route back to the southbound. We lost about two hours to this incompetence.

We ran south through Franconia as quickly as the old van would move, towards Munich, Austria, and the Iron Curtain, stopping off for a few days in Vienna with relatives of Zuzana's. While there, she took me to meet a family friend, who she referred to only as 'Simon'.  She said nothing about Simon beforehand only that she'd known him since her childhood, and that he was a close friend of her mother's. We would have little time, he was usually very busy and we in any case needed to leave Vienna.

We stepped into an old building not far from St Stephen's Cathedral, where Simon's office was situated at the far end of a first floor corridor. Small paintings hung on both walls, each one individually concealed behind it's own small curtain. A secretary nodded a greeting from her desk as we passed a side office who's walls were lined from floor to ceiling with files, as was Simon's own office.

Simon was a thick set, late middle aged man, balding, with a mustache and large friendly eyes. We chatted about the journey, he asked after Zuzana's mother, and about life in London. Then it was time to leave. "Are they paintings?" I asked, indicating the small curtains as we walked slowly along the corridor. "Why are they concealed?" "Well," said Simon, smiling and reaching to pull one of the curtains back, "it's not a happy subject for the people who work here to have in view all day, but take a look for yourself."

I had seen the nightmarish documentary films and photographs, but not the subject in painting before and it came as a shock. Here were the now familiar shapes of emaciated humans, barbed wire fencing and wooden huts of a concentration camp, but unlike the brief immediacy of photography there was a more intimate quality to much of what I was looking at, of small details of dress and anatomy, colour of skin, of environment, which only the concentrated effort of looking and rendering over a period of time can convey. It seemed grotesquely misplaced to think of some of the portraits of gaunt, hollow eyed faces as beautiful. "They made art materials out of whatever they could," said Simon, drawing a curtain back across a painting, "- pigments out the earth and charcoal, hair for brushes..."

Out in the street I turned to Zuzana. "What does Simon actually do?" I asked.  She looked at me incredulously. "You don't know what Simon Wiesenthal does? " she said. She hadn't mentioned his sir-name before.

                                                      Simon Wiesenthal 1908 - 2005

"The tracking down of Nazi criminals is, in point of fact, Wiesenthal’s lesser merit; a more important function, for at least the past thirty years, has been the fact that his persistent writing of letters has prevented Austrian and German authorities from allowing the prosecution of Nazi criminals to be quietly shelved."

(Peter Michael Lingens, former staff member of the Documentation Center. “In Lieu of a Self-Portrait”. In Simon Wiesenthal: Justice Not Vengeance. New York: George Weidenfeld, 1989. p. 19.)