Simon Wiesenthal was born in 1908 and just the other day died at the age of 96. At roughly the eage of thirty, he was sent to a Nazi prison camp. Over the course of the following decade, until the close of World War II, he would serve time in as many as ten different prisn camps. He was a victim of the Holocaust, though he was also a survivor. Yet, while he himself lived to see the liberating forces free him from his camp in Austria, some 86 membes of his family would not be so lucky. They would all die in the camps.
Wiesenthal made it his life's mission-in fact, his life, period, to hunt down those Nazi war criminals who managed to escape capture toward the end of the war. Many of these escaped to South America. Others managed to immigrate to America itself. But Wiesenthal would be responsible for tracking and finding a good many of them, and bringing them to justice, a justice that they denied a reported 6,000,000 of their helpless Jewish victims. His most famous case was the capture of Adolph Eichmann, who was the head of Hitlers Jewish genocide program. But there were others as well, and at one time Wiesenthal was accussed by some of carrying his zeal too far, by going after "mere" prison guards, low level officials and soldiers who were merely "following orders".
Yet, it would be well to remember, Wiesenthal, as a ten year prisoner in a variety of different camps, would have been in a position to know first hand the mind-set of the prison guards. He would himself perhaps have been victimized, or at least bore horrified witness, to the brutality and vicousness which these low level guards engaged in, all to willingly, all too gleefully, and sadistically.
But perhaps the most important work the Simon Wiesenthal Center performed was not in the hunting and tracking of Nazi war criminals. No, as important and even necessary as this was for the case of healing and of justice, his most important contribution was in the simple act of ensuring that the Holocaust would never be simply swept under the rug in the wake of an official apology and perhaps some minor financial renumeration, only to be quickly forgotten, and perhaps even justified and excused. No, Wiesenthal and his center would make certain the Holocaust would be remembered, in al it's horrid details, with all the victims, or as many as possible, accounted for in words and in some cases all too harrowing films and pictures. And it would be an on-going work, that serves to remind us on a regular basis of the dangers of fanaticism, of extremism, and of all kinds of bigotry and ignorance, not merely anti-Semitism.
Of course, there are the detractors, and the Holocaust deniers. But the only legitimate question as to the reality of the Holocaust is only as pertains to the legitimacy of the numbers cited, and the evidence cited against the official numbers is questionable at best. There can certainly be no denying the reality of the Holocaust itself, nor it's origin and intent. That is the really horrifyig aspect of the whole thing.
Wiesenthal lived a hard life, but I don't think it was a bitter life. Just a sad one. But a determined one. And one that was adamant in it's determination to ensure justice, remembrance, and education. I wonder sometimes if he ever took the time to enjoy himself, even with simple everyday pleasures. When you think of the life he lived, the horrors he lived and witnessed, the sorrow, and the intensity in which he engaged his professional conduct following the war, one wonders how he could.
But he certainly derived some degree of satisfaction throughout his long and distinquished life. He finally died in bed, in his sleep. At rest. A rest that he well deserved.
