Simon
Wiesenthal on survival.
[PHOTO
SOURCE: http://izquotes.com/quote/197816]
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QUOTE: "I am someone who seeks justice, not revenge. My work is
a warning to the murderers of tomorrow, that they will never rest. When history
looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to kill millions of
people and get away with it."
[Justice, Not Vengeance. New York: Grove-Weidenfeld (1989)]
AUTHOR: Simon Wiesenthal, KBE (31 December 1908 – 20 September 2005)
was an Austrian writer and Nazi hunter. He was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust
survivor who became famous after World War II for his work as a Nazi hunter.
He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. After
being forced to work as a slave labourer in Nazi
concentration camps such as Janowska,
Plaszow,
and Mauthausen
during the war, Wiesenthal dedicated most of 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 Center in Linz,
Austria, where he and others gathered information for future war crime trials
and aided refugees in their search for lost relatives. He opened the Jewish
Documentation Center in Vienna in 1961 and
continued to try to locate missing Nazi war criminals. He played a small role
in locating Adolf Eichmann, who was captured in Buenos
Aires in 1960, and worked closely with the Austrian justice ministry to prepare
a dossier on Franz Stangl,
who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1971.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Wiesenthal was involved in two high-profile
events involving Austrian politicians. Shortly after Bruno Kreisky was
inaugurated as Austrian chancellor in April 1970, Wiesenthal pointed out to the
press that four of his new cabinet appointees had been members of the Nazi
Party. Kreisky, angry, called Wiesenthal a "Jewish fascist" and
likened his organisation to the Mafia. He later accused him of collaborating
with the Nazis. Wiesenthal successfully sued for libel; the suit was settled in
1989. In 1986, Wiesenthal was involved in the case of Kurt Waldheim, whose Nazi past was revealed
in the lead-up to the 1986 Austrian presidential elections. Wiesenthal,
embarrassed that he had previously cleared Waldheim of any wrongdoing, suffered
much negative publicity as a result of this event.
With a reputation as a storyteller, Wiesenthal was the author of several
memoirs that contain tales that are only loosely based on actual events. In
particular, he exaggerated his role in the capture of Eichmann in 1960.
Wiesenthal died in his sleep at age 96 in Vienna on 20 September 2005, and was
buried in the city of Herzliya in Israel. He was survived by his daughter,
Paulinka Kreisberg, and three grandchildren. The Simon Wiesenthal Center,
located in Los Angeles, is named in his honour.
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