Simon Wiesenthal

Posted October 14, 2007, 11:42 am by Growing Bolder


Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal

Born: Dec. 31, 1908
Died: Sept. 20, 2005
A survivor of the Nazi death camps, Simon Weisenthal dedicated his life to documenting the crimes of the Holocaust and to hunting down fugitive Nazi war criminals and memorializing 6 million of his fellow Jews and 5 million other noncombatants who were systematically murdered by Nazis.

As founder and head of the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, Austria, Weisenthal ferreted out nearly 1,100 Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann, the administrator of the slaughter of the Jews.

After the Age of Seventy
He received many honors, including decorations from the French and Austrian resistance movements, the Dutch Medal of Freedom, the Luxembourg Freedom Medal and the United Nations League for the Help of Refugees award.

• At age of 62, he wrote "The Sunflower," at the age of 62;
• At age of 65, he wrote "Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus"
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  Simon Wiesenthal
• At age 72, President Jimmy Carter presented Wiesenthal with the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal.
• At age 73, the Wiesenthal Center produced the Academy Award-winning documentary "Genocide" narrated by Elizabeth Taylor and the late Orson Welles and introduced by Wiesenthal.
• At age 78, he received The French Legion of Honor.
• He worked tirelessly until his death at the age of 96.

Quotes

• “Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived.”
• “What connects two thousand years of genocide? Too much power in too few hands.”
• “None of my "clients" - not Eichmann, not Stangl, not Mengele, and not even Hitler or Stalin - was born a criminal. Somebody had to teach them to hate: maybe the society, maybe the politics, maybe just a Jewish prostitute.”
• “Technology without hatred can be a blessing. Technology with hatred is always a disaster.”
• “I know I am not only the bad conscience of the Nazis. I am also the bad conscience of the Jews. Because what I have taken up as my duty was everybody's duty.”
  

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