Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal in 1982

Simon Wiesenthal (December 31, 1908 – September 20, 2005) was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Janowska concentration camp (late 1941 to September 1944), the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp (September to October 1944), the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp (February to 5 May 1945).

After the war, Wiesenthal dedicated his life to tracking down and gathering information on fugitive Nazi war criminals so that they could be brought to trial. In 1947, he co-founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz, Austria, where he and others gathered information for future war crime trials and aided refugees in their search for lost relatives.

Quotes

• You're a religious man. You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?' there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler.' Another will say, 'I smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.' Still another will say, 'I built houses,' but I will say, 'I didn't forget you.'

• Survivors should be like seismographs... They should sense danger before others do, identify its outlines and reveal them. They are not entitled to be wrong a second time or regard as harmless something that might lead to catastrophe.
  • New York Times Obituary, 9/20/2005

• Hatred can be nurtured anywhere, idealism can be perverted into sadism anywhere. If hatred and sadism combine with modern technology the inferno could erupt anew anywhere.
  • Justice Not Vengeance, Museum of Tolerance website

Misattributed

• There is no freedom without justice.
  • Although this maxim is associated with Wiesenthal (e.g. "Honoring Simon Wiesenthal", Congressional Record—House, Vol. 151, Pt. 15, 21 September 2005, p. 20804), he did not originate the quote, which appears in the context of the labor movement in the 19th century (e.g. Alexander Spencer, "Maintain Your Union", The Typographical Journal, Vol. 10, No. 7, 1 April 1897, p. 266).

Quotes about Wiesenthal

• Simon Wiesenthal told me that any political party in a democracy that uses the word 'freedom' in its name is either Nazi or Communist.
  • Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts p. liii [1]