“NEVER FORGET”: SIMON WIESENTHAL

by Kate Tarasenko

[Originally published in the Rocky Mountain Bullhorn (Fort Collins, Colo.),

week of Oct. 6-12, 2005, pg. 5]

Simon Wiesenthal, known for decades since the Holocaust as "The Nazi Hunter," died on Sept. 20 in Vienna at the age of 96. He was personal savior
to thousands and hero to millions. His life’s path was marked by indefatigable purpose in the wake of the worst horrors modern humanity has ever
perpetrated on itself.

Losing 89 members of his family, the Ukraine-born Wiesenthal himself survived several camps—at one point, being one of just 34 survivors of one
camp’s original 149,000 prisoners—and was among those finally liberated from Austria’s Mauthausen Prison in 1945. Reunited with his wife,
Wiesenthal didn’t return to his former occupation as an architectural engineer. Instead, he worked for the U.S. Army’s various intelligence offices,
availing himself of the meticulous records kept by the Nazis, and diligently amassed and reconstructed the evidence used to prosecute them for war
crimes.

In 1947, Wiesenthal opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Austria and, together with fellow volunteers, compiled more data for
future trials. In the years that followed the war, international tensions splintered, and the U.S. and Russia drifted from their former roles as
World War II Allies to become Cold War adversaries. Tracking down and prosecuting Nazi fugitives fell off each super-powers’ radar. Discouraged
by the lack of support from either side, the volunteers of the JHDC closed down their offices in 1954 and turned over their files to the Yad Vashem
Archives in Israel.

But Wiesenthal, undeterred, recruited a new cadre of colleagues and protégés. Together they successfully tracked down more than 1,100 war-crimes
fugitives and helped bring them to justice. Perhaps the most notorious of these was Adolf Eichmann, an SS officer in Hitler’s inner circle who
oversaw the "Final Solution"—the genocide of the Jews. Eichmann was written off by the U.S. as hiding out in Syria, but Wiesenthal tracked him
down to Argentina where he was captured in 1959, tried for mass murder and executed in Israel in 1962. Whenever attention on the hunt for fugitives
flagged or governments back-burnered prosecutions, Wiesenthal enlisted the media to keep the public spotlight on his investigations.

Wiesenthal received numerous awards and medals from various governments over the years for his investigative and humanitarian work. He is the
subject of many books and films, including the semi-fictionalized "The Boys From Brazil," starring Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck. He founded
the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and authored several books.

Perhaps his most intriguing book is "The Sunflower," in which he asks leaders, writers, activists and survivors—including Desmond Tutu, Dith Pran,
Primo Levi and the Dalai Lama—this question: "You are a prisoner in a concentration camp. A dying Nazi soldier asks for your forgiveness. What
would you do?" This is not Wiesenthal engaging in philosophical repose, for the book is based on a real-life event that occurred during his
imprisonment. But the question—and the responses—seem less an issue of the limits of forgiveness than the need to keep the dialogue of humanity
itself alive, especially given the depths at which it often dwells. Even Albert Speer, tried and convicted at Nuremberg, contributed to
"The Sunflower," writing that he could not fathom being forgiven, but his response only begins there.

"Never forget" is the famous dictum of Holocaust survivors and their families, yet perpetrators of genocide seem fated to follow us generation after
generation. Anti-Semitism is a particularly virulent strain of racism, but Wiesenthal’s targets were war-mongers and oppressors forging
institutionalized hate everywhere—in Bosnia, Tibet and South Africa.

So let us remember Simon Wiesenthal—the man, his work and his words: "Freedom is not a gift from Heaven; one must fight for it every day."

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Kate Tarasenko is a freelance writer in Fort Collins.