Wiesenthal’s noble legacy
We owe Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal — who died in his sleep yesterday at the age of 96 — a great debt for the dogged way he pursued Nazi war criminals after the Second World War. At a time when the Western world was beginning to embrace a sense of moral relativism, in which there was no right or wrong, only differences in perspective, Mr. Wiesenthal was a steady voice of reason. He reminded us that there was indeed such a thing as good and evil, and that the extermination of six million Jews was an especially vile expression of the latter.
The dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Rabbi Marvin Hier, predicts that Mr. Wiesenthal will “be remembered as the conscience of the Holocaust.” Certainly that. But Mr. Wiesenthal will also be remembered as a great defender of the cause of justice. Not only for seeing that justice caught up to the Nazi murderers, but also for his insistence that the Nazis he hunted down were turned over to police and given a fair trial.
His own horrific personal experience at the hands of the Nazis might have led others to pursue more arbitrary and immediate forms of retribution. After being imprisoned in 12 Nazi camps and losing 89 relatives to the Holocaust, it would have been understandable ( if not excusable) had Mr. Wiesenthal adopted an attitude of vengeful vigilantism. His dedication to fairness is for that reason all the more admirable.
The impression given by Mr. Wiesenthal’s unfailing dedication was that his work was easy and safe. That was not the case. Neo-Nazis set off a bomb outside the Wiesenthal home in 1982, leading Mr. Wiesenthal to resort to using an armed guard. Earlier, in the 1970s, then-chancellor of Austria Bruno Kreisky accused Mr. Wiesenthal of having joined forces with the Nazis during the war to ensure he remained alive. He regularly received threatening telephone calls and letters.
But Mr. Wiesenthal persisted. And now that he is gone, the Jewish Documentation Center he started will carry on with his work of locating former Nazis and seeing that Nazi crimes are always a part of the world’s collective memory.
“ The most important thing I have done is to fight against forgetting,” Mr. Wiesenthal once said. We all have an interest in ensuring that fight continues.