Mr. Monday and other tales of Jewish Amsterdam

GENERAL EISENHOWER CALLED HIM 14 7

׳THE GREATEST LIVING EXPERT ON SECURITY׳

When the Allied armies led by General Eisenhower invaded the European continent, Oreste Pinto got a special assignment. He had to interrogate important prisoners of war. As it happened, he got practically only Nazi S.S. officers. I was a war correspondent with the Allied forces and heard the most fantastic stories about how he used to "break" these Nazi toughs. Some he approached in "Prussian" fashion, with shouting and fist-banging on the table. Other prisoners he scared stiff by subtle suggestions. One of his most successful tricks was to pretend that he was a Russian officer who had come to take the SS-er to the Soviet Union. Then he came strutting in pretending that he was that Russian, filled to the eyebrows with hatred because of the atrocities the S.S. had carried out in his homeland. He showed the photographs of homes in Kharkov burned down, men hanging from trees, and then with a tear-choked voice begged them to allow him to take the prisoner to Kharkov in order to have him tried there. "We Russians are hard, you British and Americans are softies," he would say. So I want to take this man to be tried by my own people..."

Oreste never got that S.S. man, because as soon as he had left the room, the Nazi hastily told the Americans or British all he knew and hadn't wanted to tell Oreste.

"Yesterday, I sent another back to his mother," Oreste would announce in the officer's mess.

After Germany was defeated, he got out of the army. Years later, I met him on Damrak street in Amsterdam. He looked pale. His hair had turned to grey and his eyes were dead. A cadaverous man, walking in bright sunlight. He told me that he had been decorated for his spy catching