Wiesenthal laid to rest in Israel
Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal was today lauded as “the conscience of the Holocaust” as he was laid to rest in Israel, the country that grew out of the ashes of those dark days.
Hundreds of dignitaries, Holocaust survivors and admirers attended the funeral ceremony for Wiesenthal, who died on Tuesday in his sleep at his Vienna home at 96.
A survivor of five Nazi concentration camps and seven other prisons, Wiesenthal spent the rest of his life pursuing Nazi war criminals and bringing them to justice.
“Today we are burying the conscience of the Holocaust,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, said before the ceremony began. “Nobody did more to keep alive the memories of the Holocaust than Simon Wiesenthal.”
Rabbi Michael Melchior, Israel’s deputy minister for education, said Wiesenthal taught an entire generation about the Holocaust. But instead of being embittered, Wiesenthal drew upon his past to seek hope and optimism.
“Simon Wiesenthal taught an entire generation that you learn from the past and use your knowledge…so that there will be hope in the future, hope for the Jewish nation and for the entire humanity,” Melchior said.
Wiesenthal weighed just seven stones when a US Army armoured unit liberated him and other inmates at Mauthausen in May 1945.
Enlisted by the Americans to research war criminals, he spent more than 50 years hunting Nazi war criminals, speaking out against neo-Nazism and racism, and to being a voice for the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Wiesenthal, who lost 89 relatives in the Holocaust, estimated he helped bring some 1,100 Nazi war criminals to trial.
“When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it,” he once said.
Hier recalled that Wiesenthal asked to celebrate his 90th birthday at the Hotel Imperial in Vienna.
Asked why there, Wiesenthal replied: “Because it was Hitler’s favourite hotel,” Hier said.
He wanted to show “that the Jews have outlived the Nazis,” Hier remembered.
Wiesenthal had kosher catering and a Jewish prayer service for his birthday festivities at the hotel, Hier added.
Wiesenthal was perhaps best known for his role in helping find one-time SS leader Adolf Eichmann, who organised the extermination of the Jews. Eichmann was tracked to Argentina, abducted by Israeli agents in 1960, and tried and hanged by Israel.
Wiesenthal often was accused of exaggerating his role in Eichmann’s capture, although he never claimed sole responsibility.
Among others Wiesenthal tracked down was Austrian policeman Karl Silberbauer, who he believed arrested the Dutch teenager Anne Frank and sent her to her death at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
That pursuit began in 1958 after a youth told Wiesenthal he did not believe in Frank’s existence and murder, but would if Wiesenthal could find the man who arrested her. The search led to Silberbauer’s arrest in 1963.
Wiesenthal never caught up with one prime target – Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz, who died in South America in 1979.
