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said, unless this Szymon they had in custody could prove conclusively that he was one and the same. A Polish magistrate told Wiesenthal to produce two witnesses to swear
affidavits that they knew him during the half-hour of his life that he purported to have spent in 1908.
    Having to prove his existence hardly fazed the early Wiesenthal. Scouring Buczacz for ‘witnesses who’d remember, to the exact minute, something that had happened almost twenty years
ago’, he found two neighbours who
did
remember the midwife’s announcement preceding the proud father’s uncorking a bottle of schnapps at midnight. That detail, says
Wiesenthal, ‘convinced the magistrate and settled the matter, so my birthday was legally recognized and they had to look elsewhere for the younger Szymon Wiesenthal.’ Still, this first
formal brush with bureaucracy set him thinking about his identity crisis: ‘What if it had not been New Year’s Eve? What if it had been just an ordinary night with no party, no
witnesses? Then where would I be?’
    His status clarified, he was now able to obtain a student deferment to study architecture – not at the Technical University in Lwów, the Galician provincial capital where there was
a Jewish quota, but at the Czech Technical University in Prague. The golden city on the Moldau 8 proved not only an architectural revelation, but also
– in the post-World War I democracy that Czechoslovak President Tomáš G. Masaryk created with the help of his friend Woodrow Wilson – a truly liberating experience to a
young Polish Jew who had been ‘liberated’ too many times by vicious anti-Semites.
    It was in the student cellars of Prague that the gregarious raconteur his friends now know emerged from the shadows of caution and discretion to shine as a master of ceremonies and even a
stand-up comedian. Later, back in Lwów, he would edit a satiric student weekly called
Omnibus
, which made fun of communists and Nazisand of which he suspects
‘the Polish Ministry of Interior must have a complete archive because every week the censor confiscated us for one reason or another’ – an offending cartoon or a biting
feuilleton. ‘We had many a joke together,’ he recalls of his student days, ‘we who were young with life stretching before us.’ But Simon, at least, could sense the most
ominous shadow enveloping Europe.
    In 1932, Simon’s senior year, Adolf Hitler was storming the threshold of power in Germany and, near Prague’s ghetto of the golem 9 and
Franz Kafka, Wiesenthal was a regular attraction at a Jewish students’ cabaret. ‘You know,’ he told an appreciative audience of Jewish and Gentile students in the spring of that
year, ‘we Jews have always managed to get something good to eat out of even our worst tragedies. After Pharaoh, we have matzoh for Passover. After Haman, we have
Hamantashen
10 for Purim. And, after Hitler, oh what a feast we’ll have!’
    Sixty years after he told it, I asked Simon Wiesenthal what he thought of his joke now. ‘It may have been funny then, but it isn’t funny now,’ he replied. ‘Normally, when
you have a problem, if you can make from it a joke, you can, with ten words, say more than in a book. But nobody could imagine what was Hitler. Yes, Pharaoh and Haman had hate, too, but Hitler had
the technology of genocide.’ And little did Wiesenthal know that his mother and eighty-eight other relatives would vanish into Hitler’s boxcars, gas chambers, and ovens.
    Implicit in this contemporary analysis of his own joke are two themes that recur in conversations with Wiesenthal. One is ‘humour as the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are
oppressed to smile at the situation that pains them.’ In the 1960s and 1970s, Wiesenthal published several volumes of Polish underground humour clandestinely in Poland, but under the pen-name
of ‘MishkaKukin’ – not just to protect his serious image in the West, he explained to me in 1976, but