1908-2005
That Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter who died Tuesday, lived to age 96 is an amazing testament to human endurance. Eighty-nine of his relatives perished in the Holocaust. As he was moved from concentration camp to concentration camp — 12 in all — he tried to kill himself twice. He was lined up three times to be shot, but the gunmen missed. When liberated, he weighed less than 100 pounds.
Wiesenthal’s miraculous survival spurred the obsessive mission that consumed two-thirds of his life. “The realization that I had remained alive while so many others — better ones, cleverer ones, more decent ones — had died … almost seemed to me an offense against justice,” he wrote. “I could restore the balance only by ensuring that the dead received justice.”
His mission should have been straightforward, given the enormity of the Holocaust: the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews in World War II, along with millions of others, in ways that almost defy imagination. But it wasn’t.
Read.
Wiesenthal’s war
Simon Wiesenthal’s death is not just the Jewish people’s loss. He should be sincerely mourned by the entire civilized world – by anyone still dedicated to justice, unafraid to acknowledge humanity’s dark past and determined to learn its lessons.
Today, 60 years after history’s single greatest premeditated crime, it’s not only the inexorable march of time that dims universal memories but concerted efforts to diminish or altogether deny the Holocaust. Even immediately after the wholesale industrialized slaughter, the world wasn’t in a mood to remember, much less punish. Indeed the great powers, embroiled in their Cold War, facilitated the escape of prominent henchmen.
It was this indifference that Wiesenthal took on, almost quixotically. He was alone, without money or power, himself the surviving inmate of several concentration camps, who lost 89 members of his own family. The Galician-born architect could have understandably, like many survivors, devoted his energies to rebuilding his personal life.
Instead Wiesenthal appointed himself advocate of the tortured, the starved, the degraded and the slain. He vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice and not allow the world to forget.
Seriously, read.
If, after those two reads you think any diminishing of the Holocaust would be improbable, I would like to point you toward Raven at And Rightly So! and her look at a recent development in England. Simon Wiesenthal built a deserved legacy from the Holocaust and its perpetrators — it is now up to others to protect the history of that tragedy. Such protection is the only wall against another reoccurrence, whatever group may be the target.