c. 2005 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) A few days before Simon Wiesenthal died this week _ 60 years after the end of Nazi Germany _ the German soccer federation finally released a report admitting its enthusiastic collaboration with Hitlerism. Like so much of what happened at that time, the facts were shameful and sordid and _ for an astonishing stretch of time _ secret.
For virtually all of those 60 years, Wiesenthal _ who survived the Holocaust himself only by a series of impossible flukes, gun barrels turned from his head at the last possible moment _ crusaded against the secrets, against the lies, and especially against the forgetting. From a small, cramped office in Vienna, he demanded that the world face what had happened, and demonstrated the simple but unstoppable power of bearing witness.
He insisted that no matter how politically inconvenient it might be, murderers _ even continents and decades away _ should not rest easy.
Martin Mendelsohn, who helped set up the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, told The Washington Post Wiesenthal “kept the memory of the Holocaust alive when everyone wanted it to go away. When Jewish groups wanted it to go away, he wanted to keep it alive. That is his signal accomplishment.”
Wiesenthal’s commitments to two ideas _ memory and justice _ were gifts to a world that still needs them badly.
He was an architect in Poland when the Nazis invaded. He spent the war as a captive, sometimes in death camps, occasionally escaping, always recaptured. He was liberated by the Americans from Mauthausen, and later counted 89 members of his family who had been murdered.
Almost immediately, he began collecting documentation of what had happened, providing some evidence for the earliest war crimes trials in the American zone of Germany. Soon afterward, he set up his own offices, creating a network of survivors _ and others willing to provide information _ all over Europe, collecting evidence and following the trails of Nazis all over the world.
Wiesenthal, an accidental survivor, was not a physically formidable figure, not as a cadaverous prisoner nor when he had become a legend. Late in his life, the French historian Marc Knobel called him “a little, frail, fragile man with poor health, who spoke German with a little voice and a powerful accent.”
But he also had a powerful memory and lived 96 years.
As The New York Times reported, Wiesenthal told an interviewer in Vienna in 1993, “To young people here, I am the last. I’m the one who can still speak. After me, it’s history.” Two years later, marking the 50th anniversary of the entry of allied forces into the city, he spoke from the balcony where Hitler spoke after seizing Austria.
He was not only a determined but a contentious figure, often in disputes with others over the credit for finding a particular Nazi, or the degree of war guilt clinging to Austrian politicians with Wehrmacht war records.
He battled over the focus of Holocaust memory. When the Simon Wiesenthal Center opened in Los Angeles, he insisted it be dedicated not only to 6 million murdered Jews, but to the millions of others _ homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies.
He told The Washington Post, “I’m not dividing the victims” _ a principle that remains painfully relevant.
For years, we’ve been sunk in an elaborate calculation about Darfur in the Sudan, estimating just when mass murder gets its head above the bar to qualify as genocide. Cambodia’s Pol Pot died safely in his bed.
But Slobodan Milosevic does sit in a cell in The Hague, and slowly _ intolerably slowly _ the world is tweezing out the facts and the responsibilities in Rwanda.
There is now a sense in the world that when the bodies pile up in the killing fields and the lies spill out of the government ministries, there will be somebody _ maybe just a small, bald person with a strong accent _ who will make it his business to remember.
And that memory is the world’s ultimate superpower.
MO/RB END SARASOHN
(David Sarasohn is an associate editor at The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.)
