Jews Deported by Waldheim, Survivor Says : Austrian Accused of Directing Roundup at Village in Greece

A man who says he saw Kurt Waldheim beat his brother and another Jew during World War II charged Sunday that the newly elected Austrian president personally supervised the deportation of nearly 2,000 Jews from a village in northwestern Greece to Nazi concentration camps in 1944.

Moshe Mayuni, a Greek Jew who now lives near Tel Aviv, said that Waldheim, then a lieutenant in the German army, came to his village of Yanina in northwestern Greece on March 24, 1944, to supervise the detention and transportation of the 1,860 Jews living there.

The Jews were sent over the next two days to a makeshift detention center at Larisa in central Greece, from where most were eventually transported by train to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland and other slave labor camps from which most never returned.

“He (Waldheim) was the central figure in this. He was in charge. In every area of Greece they sent someone to gather up the Jews, and he was the one in charge in our place,” Mayuni said in a telephone interview with The Times.

‘I Could Never Forget Him’

“I am sure it is the same man,” he added. “I could never forget him. I saw him twice, once in our village when he came to supervise our detention and a few days later in Larisa, where he confiscated our valuables and beat my brother and another man on the head with a club for not following an order.”

Waldheim, the former U.N. secretary general who Sunday was elected president of Austria, has repeatedly denied allegations by world and U.S. Jewish organizations and Israeli officials that he knew about or was involved in Nazi war crimes during service in Greece and Yugoslavia during World War II.

But Mayuni’s recollections of the activities of the German officer he maintains was Waldheim are believed to constitute the most serious, detailed and explicit allegations to date that Waldheim not only knew about Nazi war crimes but personally participated in them.

Israeli Statement

Israel, reacting to Waldheim’s election, issued a statement through the Foreign Ministry expressing “deep regret and disappointment” at the results of the Austrian elections.

“Though Waldheim’s election did not come as a surprise, we hoped until the last minute that common sense would prevail with the Austrian people and the election of a man with a past like Waldheim’s to the presidency would be prevented,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

Government sources said that Prime Minister Shimon Peres will meet with Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir today to discuss a further Israeli response, which could include downgrading diplomatic relations with Austria. “The options being discussed at the moment range from recalling our ambassador for consultations to recalling him period,” a senior Foreign Ministry source said.

Certain It Was Waldheim

Recalling events of 42 years ago in considerable detail and without apparent hesitation, Mayuni said that several German officers, including Waldheim, landed near his village in a seaplane on March 24, 1944. “We didn’t know who they were but we saw them,” Mayuni said, adding that the officer who appeared to be in charge was the man he is now certain was Waldheim.

“They rounded us (the Jews) up the next day and took us in vehicles to Larisa,” a town about 110 miles away in central Greece, “where they had set up a detention center at a former Greek army motor pool,” Mayuni said.

“There we saw him again, the same person who was with the plane. He was tall, thin, with a big nose and he limped very slightly, as though his leg had been injured.”

Mayuni said that all the prisoners from Yanina were lined up and made to file past five straw baskets in which the officer instructed them to drop all of their gold jewelry and other valuables.

“He said to us that where you are going, you will need nothing. He said we must put all our valuables in the baskets, watches, rings, chains, earrings, everything,” Mayuni said.

“The baskets were like the kind you put apples in, and after we had finished they were all full of gold,” he recalled. “Then after he had gathered everything, he turned to my brother Baruch, who was next to me and told him to take the baskets to his car. But my brother did not understand him. He didn’t understand his German. I didn’t understand either at first and only later realized what he wanted.”

The tall, thin officer wore “well pressed” clothes and carried a club, “a round wooden club that he took from under his arm and hit my brother with over the head twice,” for not obeying him, Mayuni said. “He also hit the man standing next to him. My brother passed out and the other man bled profusely,” he said.

Mayuni identified the other man who was beaten as Yehoshua Matza, who now lives in Beersheba, Israel.

Asked why he did not come forward with his allegations before, Mayuni said he did not realize that the officer who bludgeoned his brother was Waldheim until he saw pictures on Israeli television of the former U.N. secretary general as a young man dressed in his army uniform.

Asked how he could be so sure, after so many years, that it was the same man, he replied in a voice choking with emotion: “Because I will never forget. That one picture is etched into my mind for my whole life. When I saw his picture, I nearly jumped through the ceiling. It is the same man. I am positive, one million percent positive.”

Escaped From Camp

Mayuni, who was 21 at the time of the incident, said he escaped from the transit camp along with five other people eight days after arriving there. “The camp was guarded by old Wehrmacht soldiers, not Nazis, who I don’t even think knew who we were. The Red Cross used to bring us soup, and one day after six people from the Red Cross came in, six of us walked out with papers we had forged,” Mayuni said.

He said that his brother, three years his senior, after having been beaten by Waldheim was “too frightened” to join them in the escape. He stayed behind and was eventually shipped off to a slave labor camp, where he died. Mayuni said that he linked up with Greek partisans and fought in the underground until Greece was liberated by the Allies several months later. He emigrated to Israel in 1949 and now lives in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, where he works as a clerk in a small grocery store.

Israeli Justice Ministry officials investigating the mounting allegations of Waldheim’s involvement in war crimes declined to comment on Mayuni’s account on grounds that the contents of a report prepared by the Justice Ministry on the Waldheim affair and submitted to Peres was confidential.

However Mayuni is apparently the witness cited by Israeli Justice Minister Yitzhak Modai, who told reporters in New York earlier this week that he knew of an Israeli citizen who saw Waldheim beating his brother to death with a stick near Salonika, Greece.

Although Modai appears to have gotten some of the details of the incident wrong, Mayuni’s testimony appeared to support and lend more detail to purported Nazi documents made public Friday by the World Jewish Congress, indicating that Waldheim had conveyed to his superiors a German army division request for the seizure and deportation of Greek civilians in August, 1943. The purported request, which was signed by Waldheim, also warned of anti-Nazi Jewish activity “in the town of Yanina,” which it said “must be regarded as a center of preparations for a resistance movement.”

Diplomatic Quandary

The Israeli government appears to be in something of a diplomatic quandary over how to respond to the Waldheim affair. Foreign Minister Shamir and Justice Minister Modai, who said recently that Israel has enough evidence to bring Waldheim to trial as an accessory to war crimes, appeared to favor a strong approach. However, other senior government sources said that Israel needs to weigh its reaction carefully because Austria is an important transit point for Jews leaving the Soviet Union. Because of this and other diplomatic considerations, some Israelis and some American Jews have expressed concern that Israel’s reaction to Waldheim’s election won’t be strong enough.

Dov Shilansky, a member of Parliament from Shamir’s Likud Bloc and a Holocaust survivor, said that Israel “must not trade the memory of 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis for the profit of the moment.”

Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the American Hebrew Congregations, said in a statement from the hospital bed where he is recovering from a heart attack suffered in Israel last month that Waldheim’s election proves “that Austrians have changed little since they cheered the advancing (Nazi) storm troops” in 1938.

“The country that gave us Adolf Hitler has now chosen one of his early admirers as president,” Schindler said, adding that “No self-respecting Jewish organization will convene in Austria as long as it is led by a man who was witness and gave silent assent to genocidal acts and then lied about it.”

Mayuni, who said that he had not yet been interviewed by Israeli investigators, declared that Israel is “doing less than any other country” to protest Waldheim’s election.

“I am just a working man who can do nothing, but it makes me sick to see him elected. From my family alone he took 54 people. From our community of nearly 2,000, only 98 returned. For me, he is the one,” said Mayuni. “He is the one responsible for sending them to the death camps. He is the one who had them burned.”