Cyla Wiesenthal

Cyla Wiesenthal, who survived Nazi concentration camps, forced labour, years in hiding and the false wartime news of her husband's death, has died at the age of 95, after 67 years of marriage to the Austrian Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Having escaped the communist roundup of "bourgeois and Jewish elements" in 1939 by bribing a Soviet official, the couple were less lucky when the Nazis took over. Along with the rest of the Jewish population, they were forced to move into a ghetto, and Simon lost his architectural engineering business. Three months later, they were imprisoned, first in a nearby concentration camp, and then in a forced-labour camp, where they were made to do menial work on the railways. A comparatively lax, non-SS regime enabled them to meet frequently, despite the Nazi policy of segregation of the sexes. Fearing transportation to the new SS death camps as the final solution programme got under way in 1942, Simon Wiesenthal cast about for a means of saving his wife. He was able to strike a bargain with the underground Polish home army: he would supply intelligence about the railway in exchange for help with her escape, and the provision of false papers in the name of Irena Kowalska. The Wiesenthals were separated at the beginning of 1943, when Cyla was spirited out of the labour camp to Lublin, where she became an informal nanny to an architect's family, passing herself off as the wife of a captured Polish officer. The Nazi authorities in Lublin, however, continued to subject unauthorised visitors to arbitrary arrest, and Cyla decided to try to contact her husband; she took the train back to Lemberg, hiding in the station for two days. They managed a brief exchange through the wire fence round the camp, and the Polish home army helped her find a bed in a Warsaw flat and a job in an electrical factory. Simon Wiesenthal was then deported from Lemberg to the notoriously harsh Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. During the Warsaw Rising of August 1944, the street in which Cyla had lived until her deportation had been completely destroyed by the Nazis. Now it was Simon's turn to be told, again in good faith, that his wife had been killed. He was also moved to another Austrian camp, where he was liberated by the Americans in May 1945. Thus, at the end of the war, each of the Wiesenthals believed that the other was dead; 89 of their relatives had also vanished in the Holocaust. Cyla returned to Poland, while Simon got a job with an American army war-crimes unit in Austria - the origin of what became his lifelong campaign to hunt down escaped Nazi war criminals. It was only a chance encounter with an old acquaintance in Cracow that revealed Simon's survival to Cyla. After many vicissitudes, they were eventually reunited in Linz at the end of 1945; their only child, Pauline, was born the following year. Like her future husband, Cyla Müller was born in Buczek, south of Lodz, in a part of Poland then in the Austrian empire, a status that entitled them to Austrian passports even after the end of the second world war. She met him at the local grammar school in 1923. When his parents left the area, Simon stayed on to complete his studies, and rented a room in the Müllers' house. The couple married in 1936, and moved to Lvov, where Simon Wiesenthal started a business. His postwar mission to track down Nazis grew into an all-consuming obsession, resulting in more than 1,000 successes, based on an elaborate archive and a worldwide private intelligence network. Dramas and death threats became almost routine. Cyla chose to stay at home and distance herself from all this, while Simon kept his work to himself. Yet their marriage endured for two-thirds of a century.