"Armed Ukrainians were herding other Jews in our direction. Some had locked themselves in 'their houses and the doors had to be broken down and the people dragged out kicking and screaming. I recognized Pieter Menten in a German uniform, along with two other Gestapo agents. They had mounted machine guns in front of them. I saw Ukrainians digging a pit some 15 yards from the guns. You could hear voices and crying. Later the guards began to take people out in small groups of ten and twelve. They pushed them onto planks set over the pit. Then you could hear the machine guns. A continuous rat-ta-ta-tat. It was Menten with the two Germans."
Abe Pollak, 65, a Polish-born Jew who is now a New York hotel electrician, vividly remembers those horrible events of Aug. 27, 1941. Pollak ran from the scene and managed to escape the massacre that befell his family and their Jewish neighbors in the East Galician town of Urice. For years he lived alone with his nightmare, but now it is known to millions of Dutch citizens—as is their fellow countryman, Millionaire Art Collector Pieter Nicolaas Menten, 77. Last week Dutch and Swiss police finally cornered the fleeing Menten and his wife in a hotel near Zurich. Found in Menten's room: photocopies of Swiss extradition law, and tickets for a TWA flight to New York. Menten unsuccessfully attempted suicide shortly after his capture.
Bringing him to bay came as a vast relief to the embarrassed Dutch government, which had inexplicably fumbled his arrest three weeks before, allowing the alleged war criminal to escape from his palatial Blaricum estate, and causing a national scandal.
Deep Grudge. Born to a wealthy Rotterdam family, Menten first became interested in Poland through his father's business connections there. The son, in turn, developed an extensive export trade in Dutch products to Poland. Menten moved in 1923 to East Galicia (then in Poland, now part of the U.S.S.R.'s Ukraine), where he became a prosperous landowner and businessman. He was mild-mannered and quiet, but developed a deep grudge against a prominent neighboring Jewish family over a business dispute. Menten went home to Holland in 1939, when Russia invaded eastern Poland, and returned in 1941 after the Nazi counter-occupation—this time as a member of the SS. In Galicia, according to witnesses, he helped shoot as many members of the offending family as he could find, then turned on other Jews in the area.
The Nazi occupiers thought highly of Menten, and made him, among other things, a custodian of Jewish antique dealerships. On his trip back to Holland in 1943, he traveled in a private train carrying four carloads of his personal art works. This remarkable shipment brought him to the notice of Dutch Resistance fighters, and after the war Menten was tried as a Nazi collaborator.