"conscience of the Holocaust" was buried Friday, September 23, in Israel. Wiesenthal, who dedicated most of the last six decades to find World War Two crimes suspects, died in his sleep Tuesday, September 20, at his home in Vienna at the age of 96.
Hundreds of mourners including Holocaust survivors and officials from Austria, Germany, Poland, Russia, the United States and the European Union attended the funeral in Herzliya, northern Israel. A memorial service, attended by Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel, was held in Vienna on Wednesday, September 21, and Wiesenthal’s body was flown to Israel on Thursday. His daughter and grandson live in Herzliya.
Wiesenthal was credited with helping bring over 1,100 Nazis to justice by painstakingly gathering information at the three-room office of his Vienna-based Jewish Documentation Centre, which he founded just two years after the war.
"Simon Wiesenthal was the conscience of the Holocaust," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the human tghts group named in Wiesenthal’s honor, in a statement seen earlier this week by BosNewsLife News Center in Budapest.
OVERCOMING "INDIFFERENCE"
Overcoming "the world’s indifference and apathy," Simon Wiesenthal helped bring over 1,100 Nazi War Criminals before the Bar of Justice, the organization said. Wiesenthal also played an important part in helping the Israeli secret service track down Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Nazis’ "Final Solution" — the extermination of Europe’s Jewish population.
Eichmann was seized by Israeli agents in Argentina and taken to Israel to be tried. He was sentenced to death there in 1961, something that would have been impossible without Wiesenthal’s determination, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said.
No cabinet ministers attended the funeral, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stayed away due to security concerns, Israeli media reported. Deputy Minister Michael Melchior, who represented the government at the funeral, reportedly that "(Wiesenthal) acted in the name of justice. Even criminals who were not caught knew that there is a Wiesenthal and others like him looking for them hour by hour day after day."
On Wednesday, September 21, Sharon spoke of the "great debt" owed by the State of Israel, the Jewish people and humanity to Wiesenthal. The statement said "Wiesenthal devoted his life to ensuring that the horrors of the past would not return and that the hands of the murderers would not be made clean. "We are all indebted to his important enterprise."
UNPOPULAR JOB
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said his job was unpopular. "When the Holocaust ended in 1945 and the whole world went home to forget, he alone remained behind to remember. He did not forget [and] became the permanent representative of the victims, determined to bring the perpetrators of the history’s greatest crime to justice," he said.
Hier stressed there was "no press conference and no president or Prime Minister or world leader announced his appointment. He just took the job. It was a job no one else wanted." He also received death threats and in June 1982, a bomb exploded at the front door of his house in Vienna where he lived with his wife Cyla, until her death November 10, 2003. No one was injured, but the explosion caused great damage.
Born in 1908 in the town of Buchach in what is now Ukraine, Wiesenthal practiced architecture prior to World War II, when he was twice imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, in 1941-43 and 1944-45, experts said.
Wiesenthal was freed by American soldiers from the camp at Mauthausen in central Austria in May 1945, but dozens of his family members, among them his mother, stepfather and stepbrother died in the Nazi genocide.
DOCUMENTATION CENTER
He founded the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna two years after the end of the war and in 1977 helped set up the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, to fight bigotry and anti-Semitism worldwide. Around 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, experts say, 600-thousand of which were Hungarians.
When asked why he became a Nazi hunter, he was quoted as saying that "when history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it."
Wiesenthal was often asked to explain his motives for becoming a Nazi hunter. He reportedly once spent the Sabbath at the home of a former Mauthausen inmate, now a well-to-do jewelry manufacturer. After dinner his host said, "Simon, if you had gone back to building houses, you’d be a millionaire. Why didn’t you?"
"You’re a religious man," replied Wiesenthal. "You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, ‘What have you done?’, there will be many answers. You will say, ‘I became a jeweler’, Another will say, I have smuggled coffee and American cigarettes’, Another will say, ‘I built houses’, But I will say, ‘I didn’t forget you’."
His work stands as a reminder and a warning for future generations, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said. (With Stefan J. Bos, BosNewsLife Research and reports from Israel)
