KELLY DAVIES
Staff Writer
Simon Wiesenthal, once called “the conscience of the Western world,” died Tuesday, Sept. 20 and was laid to rest in Israel. Thousands gathered at his funeral to honor the man who gave a voice to 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. This was a man whose story is a deeply moving testament to the courage of the human spirit, a story of the horrors of the past and those who had lived it. His story makes me wonder about who the conscience of the Western world is today.
Wiesenthal worked as an architect in Ukraine before he was shipped to a labor camp in the grips of the “Final Solution,” the plan to mass execute Jewish people.
As the Germans set about their horrifying extermination of the Jews, Wiesenthal secretly smuggled his wife to Poland, where they were separated for two years. Eighty-nine members of his and his wife’s family were killed. At his rescue in 1945, he weighed fewer than 100 pounds when he handed his American rescuers a paper with the names of his captors on it.
From then on, the “Nazi Hunter” committed his life to tracking down those responsible for such atrocities by painstakingly gathering evidence to build cases against thousands of Nazis. By his retirement in 2003, he had brought down Adolf Eichmann, the man behind the “Final Solution,” Karl Silberauer, who confessed to arresting Anne Frank, and 1,100 other Nazi war criminals.
It is reported that Wiesenthal was once asked why he did not return to the comfort of life as an architect. He replied, “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.’”
As we learn from the lessons of the past and of the world Wiesenthal sought to change, it becomes essential that people understand today’s challenges. Evil and genocide appear every generation. Who in our generation will defy evil with the same dogged determination as Wiesenthal?
There are segments of Muslim extremists in the Middle East on a mission to exterminate those who refuse to bend to their will, a parallel strikingly similar to the extermination policy of the Nazis. Not every Muslim is like this; that’s like saying every German was a Nazi. But we do need to recognize there are people who need to be stopped before what began on Sept. 11 becomes this generation’s Holocaust for those who believe in life and liberty.
There are legitimate questions about the war in Iraq. There is a fundamental concept on which we can all agree, if we recognize the stakes are high enough (and they are). “The combination of hatred and technology is the greatest danger threatening mankind,” Wiesenthal said. It’s a terrifying world we must face — full of hatred, ripe with the possibility of nuclear and biological warfare. Therefore the concept we must grasp is, as Edmund Burke said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” This week has seen the passing of one of those good men who did something.
There wasn’t anything Wiesenthal could do to stop those people; he could only hold them accountable for their actions. Our challenge is to stop it from happening in the first place. We must be eternally vigilant.
09-29-2005