Tribute to a Man Who Hunts the Past

I first met Simon Wiesenthal in the early 1960s when my wife and I visited him in Vienna. When the taxi driver heard where we were going, he grumbled, “Wiesenthal, a terrible man, always living in the past and looking under everybody’s carpet.”

Wiesenthal grew up in Buczacz, Poland, in a religious family. When he was refused entry at the University of Lvov because of anti-Semitic quotas, he entered the University of Prague to study architecture. There, he graduated in 1932 as an architectural engineer, but never settled into his profession. Adolf Hitler saw to that.

Simon was liberated from Mathausen concentration camp on May 8, 1945, by the U.S. Army. He looked like a skeleton at death’s doorstep.

But rather than sketching houses and beautifying communities, he would become famous for profiling the perpetrators who destroyed them. He had no preparation for his work. He never trained at MI6, the British intelligence agency, or took a course with the CIA.

His wife Cyla said the man she married was also married to 6 million dead people. She was right. He could not let go of the memories. When the war ended, everybody went on with their lives, even the victims. Wiesenthal tried as well, but he told me, “Wherever I looked, they were there; their images just stared at me.” They haunted him, his memories. There were the 89 members of his and his wife’s families who were wiped out and his recollection of chasing after the train that took his mother to the gas chamber.

Without fanfare, Wiesenthal became the representative of the victims. It was a job that no one else wanted. Many Jews could not understand why. They asked, “Who cares? What good will it do? Will it bring any of our loved ones back?”

He began working with U.S. Army intelligence and later set up a small office, first in Linz, Austria, and then in Vienna. The task was overwhelming. The cause of hunting Nazis had few friends. There were no great writers then to stir the world’s conscience. Primo Levi was unknown and Elie Wiesel had not yet written. The Allies felt they had done their duty by convening the Nuremberg trials. Wiesenthal found himself serving in the dual capacity of prosecutor and detective--tasks he was not qualified to assume. Tremendous amounts of information filtered in, most of which he and a few friends pursued.

In the early 1950s, he received a tip that Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the “final solution,” was working in Buenos Aires. Wiesenthal wrote to many prominent Jewish organizations asking for $500 to hire someone to go down and investigate. But no one was interested. He was soon forced to close his office because of a lack of funds.

After Mossad agents successfully tracked and captured Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960, Wiesenthal’s assistance in the case was widely noted. He had no direct role in Eichmann’s capture, but without him, no one would have been interested in the case. In 1947, when Eichmann’s former wife, Veronica Libel, tried to get a court to declare Eichmann legally dead, it was Wiesenthal who persuaded the judge that it was nothing more than a family conspiracy. And in 1948, Wiesenthal obtained the only known photographs of Eichmann, which he passed on to authorities.

Over the years, he has been involved in more than 1,100 cases, bringing to justice people like Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, Gustav Wagner, commandant of Sobibor, Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas vans, and Karl Silberbauer, the man who arrested Anne Frank. It is true he never caught Dr. Josef Mengele nor was his information always accurate, but neither is the CIA’s or MI6’s, whose resources are far greater. But every Nazi war criminal sleeps a little less soundly because Simon Wiesenthal is still out there. That too is a measure of justice.

Wiesenthal has never been able to live a normal life. Wherever he goes, the Holocaust traveled with him. Once while we waited at Dulles Airport for a connection to Chicago, he became engaged in a fight at the counter. I rushed over and asked him what had happened. He told me the man in front of him was on his list of suspected war criminals who he wanted the U.S. to prosecute. They were boarding the same flight, and Wiesenthal refused to travel with him. The airline agreed and ordered the suspect to take another flight.

In summing up his life, Wiesenthal put it this way: “One day when my life is over, and I meet up with the martyred millions, they will ask me, ‘What have you done?’ I will have the privilege to say to them, ‘I have never forgotten you.’ ”

Happy 90th, Simon. The world is a better place because of you.