Gershon Evan stood slightly apart from the others, shifting his weight nervously from leg to leg, wondering how he would feel when he saw the mask.
He watched as the woman, under the bleached glare of a fluorescent bulb, opened a small crate and beckoned him forward. He approached and peered in.
There in the box lay a white gypsum mask, just like one of those 19th-century death masks molded from the faces of the newly dead, its features preserved with ghostly perfection.
“Is that really me?” Evan asked in his still-perfect German. “It doesn’t even look like me.”
The woman, Margit Berner, an anthropologist at Austria’s Museum of Natural History, assured him it was.
She pointed out the inscription on the back of the mask. “You see?” Berner said to him. “Here is your name: Gustav Pimselstein.”
Gustav Pimselstein. That was the name the Nazis had forced on him long ago in Vienna (he was born Gustav Ziegler, which did not sound sufficiently Jewish to the Germans).
That was his name as the Nazis undertook the wholesale destruction of Vienna’s Jewish community.
That was his name when Nazi scientists herded him, then a frightened 16-year-old boy, into a bare examination room, measured his features with calipers and made a mask of his face.
Pimselstein went on to survive Buchenwald and evacuation to pre-state Israel. Changing his name to Gershon Evan, he later fought in the Israeli War of Independence and the 1956 Sinai Campaign, eventually immigrating to America and to San Francisco.
But nothing reminded him so forcefully of his miraculous survival than his return to Vienna 64 years later and coming face to face with his own death mask.
“At first, it was like seeing an old acquaintance,” Evan, now 80, remembers. “When she put it back in the box, it was like putting me in a coffin.”
A short man with piercing blue eyes, Evan still has a need to talk about the past, even at the risk of enduring one painful memory after another.
Those memories don’t begin so badly. Born in 1923, Evan grew up surrounded by the withering vestiges of Vienna’s imperial splendor.
The city still held many charms: ornate architecture, wide boulevards and cozy cafes, the waltzes and minuets of a bygone day. And for the local Jewish community, life had been good, with anti-Semitism a real but generally low-grade irritant.
That all changed in March 1938, when Hitler’s army invaded and occupied Austria. The Nazi banner hung from every lintel and balustrade. Vienna’s Jews ran scared.
Over the ensuing months, as war loomed, Nazi thugs tormented the Jewish population, eventually launching a ruthless deportation campaign.
In September 1939, Evan was arrested along with 1,000 other young Jewish men and taken to Vienna’s Prater Stadium, where all were detained for weeks.
Seeking out those with classic “Semitic” features, Nazi scientists — a commission of the anthropology department of the Natural History Museum — selected 440 men for study.
Hair samples, fingerprints, hereditary/ biological appraisals and numerous photographs of the men were taken. The length and width of their noses, lips, chins and other facial features were meticulously documented.
The Nazis sought very specific “types” for their research, and only 19 of the corralled Jews made the final cut. Evan was one of them.
That’s when he was ordered to lie down for the mask.
“My head on the pillow, I stretched out on the table and closed my eyes,” he recalled in his memoirs years later. “The man advised me to relax, while he coated my face with a greasy substance. He applied it from the top of my forehead down to the throat and from ear to ear. The lubricant, he explained, was to prevent the hardened plaster of Paris from sticking to my skin.”
At the end of the procedure, the death mask was removed, catalogued and archived. Evan received as compensation a single cigarette, which he later gave to a fellow Jew in the stadium.
(Within a month, all 1,000 men were transported to Buchenwald. Though most eventually died there, Evan was inexplicably — and miraculously — released four months later, along with a few other relatively healthy young inmates.)
Why would the Nazis collect such seemingly useless physical data? It was all part of their twisted notion of racial purity and the vast German scientific effort to support it.
For decades prior to the rise of Nazism, eugenics had been a respected field of study. Eugenicists sought to ensure for “more suitable races…a better chance of prevailing over the less suitable,” according to Francis Galton, the British founder of the field who coined the term in 1883.
Concluding that some races were created more equal than others, eugenicists believed that “inferior races,” such as black Africans and Jews, might potentially overrun purer, smarter, better Northern European races.
According to Stefan Kuhl in his book “The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism,” Germany was not the leader in eugenics theory.
America was.
In the early 20th century, some states passed laws to prevent the procreation of “inferior families.” At the federal level, Congress even passed legislation to restrict immigration to largely “Nordic” populations.
By the 1920s, America’s eugenics movement was the most influential in the Western world. In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler himself saluted the U.S. Immigration Restriction Act and its intended purpose of ranking “races” according to their genetic “suitability.”
Prominent Americans like Henry Ford and birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger were ardent believers in eugenics. American, German and British academics routinely met at conferences, seeking ways to rid the world of so-called inferior races.
But the Nazis went on to “perfect” racial science, developing a corpus of research that now joins alchemy, epicircles and phrenology on the ash heap of discarded scientific falsehoods.
As the Nazi era wore on, the cruelty of this pseudo-science broke all bounds. Thousands were sterilized. Diabolical experiments on twins, pregnant women and children later shocked the world. Auschwitz’s Dr. Josef Mengele became only the most notorious practitioner of such monstrous medicine.
At the time the Nazis cast his death mask, Evan could not have known that he epitomized some perverse Nazi ideal of Jewish physiognomy. Fortunately for him, he escaped Europe on the Rotgasse Transport, the last boatlift of Jews bound for pre-state Israel before the Nazi Final Solution was put into effect.
After the war, the German government compensated Evan $100 for his internment in Buchenwald — “66 cents for each day spent in hell,” as he wrote later.
For Evan, there was life after Hitler. He served with distinction in the British and Israeli armies, and he was a citizen of the Jewish state for many years after the war. He moved to the United States in the early ’60s, settling first in Denver, where he worked a string of jobs before becoming a quality-control inspector for the Samsonite Luggage Co.
In 1964, he relocated to San Francisco, where he owned and operated Rina’s Deli (named for his Israeli-born wife) on Taraval Street. Later he ran his own European gourmet foods import business, retiring in the mid-’80s to begin work on his memoirs.
The mask itself probably would have remained nothing more than a distant memory, though he never forgot the experience.
In his memoirs, he writes: “I would have loved to find out how I fit into their statistics. For all I know, my mask and personal details may still exist in some crates in a storage room somewhere.”
He had no idea how right he was.
Back in Austria, Margit Berner and her colleagues had embarked on an interdisciplinary research project on the subject of “Anthropology Under National Socialism.”
She had uncovered the death masks among several containers-worth of long-forgotten Nazi-era relics. Rather than being shipped to Germany, as Evan theorized, the masks never left Austria.
“They were not part of the [museum’s] inventory, and the numbers and names written on them were unclear,” Berner writes in an e-mail.
“I found the related measurement sheets and photographs labeled ‘Wiener Stadion 1939,’ and through literature and research, I discovered that this material might be linked to the imprisonment in the Vienna Stadium.”
Once she realized what she had uncovered, Berner set out to determine if any of the “masked men” still lived.
“One aim was to reconstruct the historical background of this relatively unknown deportation,” she writes, “and also form a view of the history of science and racism.”
Among the 19 whose faces were cast, Evan is one of only two still alive. All of the other original 1,000 detainees have since died, most within the first months at Buchenwald. Of the 440 studied, only 24 survived the war.
Before she knew that, Berner researched the database of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, seeking anyone with the surname Pimselstein. One name came up: Betty Pimselstein (born Berta) of Florida. It turned out she is the sister of Gershon Evan.
“She’s unbelievable, very persistent,” Evan says of Berner.
“She started to research this, and she came to look for the people, but the people are all dead. So she looked for their children and grandchildren.”
Once contacted, Evan was invited to return to Vienna, to examine the mask, and to seek reconciliation with the past.
This past May, he spent two weeks in the Austrian capital as an honored guest of the very same Natural History Museum and of the Jewish Welcoming Committee. Austrian President Thomas Klestil even received him in Hofburg Palace.
Evan’s daughter Clara (who lives in Austin, Texas) accompanied him. His son Shabtai, of Saratoga, joined them for a few days at the end of the trip and was there to meet Klestil.
“The president was with me over half an hour,” Evan says.
“For the president of a country to be with a little Jewish guy like me for half an hour? He almost became my friend.”
Over the years, Evan has been back to Austria many times. “This is the only place in the world where I like to walk so much,” he says in his lilting Viennese accent.
“When I went back in 1971, I visited the streets I walked around when I was a kid.”
But certainly his trip in May was the only visit during which he received a hero’s welcome.
He appeared twice on Austrian television. He also gave a lecture at the Jewish Museum of Vienna, where he received a standing ovation. And he was a guest of honor at a museum fund-raising dinner for some 300 people.
While Evan recognizes that anti-Semitism hasn’t been totally eradicated in Austria, he says, “I think it’s wrong to find the children and grandchildren guilty of the sins of the fathers. The people that I met were such nice people, so friendly, and I could really be close with those people.”
Evan made quite an impact on Berner and her colleagues. The scientists have since contacted descendants of at least 99 of the Prater Stadium prisoners, and they are now writing a compilation of biographies of the 440 men studied by the Nazi scientists.
Today, Evan lives in quiet contentment with his wife, Rina. He published his memoir, “Winds of Life: The Destinies of a Young Viennese Jew 1938-1958,” three years ago.
Meanwhile, the struggle against eugenics is not over. The concept of racial purity persists, sometimes taking on the veneer of academic respectability, as with the publication of the controversial 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” which stirred a heated debate about race, IQ and intelligence.
That battle rages far from Gershon Evan’s Sunset District home. But he can never forget the central lessons of his experience.
“When I was in Buchenwald weighing 80 pounds,” he says, “I told myself I must survive so I can tell about this. I learned there is nothing you cannot survive.”