Simon Wiesenthal: A Life in Search of Justice

Plot

A biography of Wiesenthal, based partly on interviews with him and with other persons. Wiesenthal was born in Buczacz in 1908. Ch. 4 (pp. 51-72) deals with the war years. Wiesenthal was interned in prison in Lvov, taken for forced labor, interned in the Lvov ghetto, and then in the Janowska camp. In 1943 he escaped, but he was caught in June 1944 and went through a number of camps, from Płaszów to Mauthausen, where he was liberated. The rest of the book deals with his postwar activities hunting down Nazi criminals. In 1947, Wiesenthal established the Historical Documentation Centre, first in Linz and then in Vienna. Wiesenthal ascribes to himself a key role in hunting down Eichmann, Stangl, and other Nazi criminals, which has led to quarrels with other Nazi hunters. However, it was Wiesenthal who persisted in the search for Eichmann in the late 1940s-50s. He also fought against the statute of limitation in Germany and Austria. During the Waldheim affair, Wiesenthal rejected the accusation that Waldheim was a war criminal, which aroused the ire of the World Jewish Congress. Despite many oddities in Wiesenthal's character, he always has been a man of conscience and a hero of our epoch.