Justice, not vengeance

Editorial

Simon Wiesenthal was barely clinging to life when American troops liberated Mauthausen in May 1945. Yet even as he regained his strength in the final days of the war, Wiesenthal was already dedicating himself to the cause that would consume the rest of his life.

Wiesenthal would run a social welfare agency aiding other survivors, but his passion – and his enduring legacy – was the quest for justice on behalf of the Holocaust's victims.

It was due in large part to Wiesenthal's tenacity that the Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann was brought to justice in Israel. Though Eichmann was the most prominent, many Nazis faced justice due in large part or exclusively to the work of Wiesenthal. In a world that often seemed willing to let Nazi atrocities be bygones, Wiesenthal's doggedness was the only thing that interrupted the comfortable post-war lives of many perpetrators of the Shoah.

Wiesenthal's motivation was relatively simple. He summed it up this way: "When history looks back, I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to kill millions of people and get away with it."

An estimated 1,100 Nazi war criminals faced the consequences of their actions due to Wiesenthal's devotion to the mantra "Justice, not vengeance."

Even in the Allied-occupied remnants of the concentration camps, Wiesenthal took it upon himself to begin compiling documentation and witness testimony about the individual perpetrators of the Nazi horrors.

For a time, he worked with American government forces, but most of his career was spent on an independent quest for justice. Without Wiesenthal's moral imperative to seek justice on behalf of the victims, it is safe to say that many more perpetrators would have gone free.

Wiesenthal wrote in his memoirs about how he began to assemble information on the Nazi war criminals even as he struggled to regain his strength. There were days after liberation when Wiesenthal, like so many others, could still have succumbed to the physical results of sustained torture. Even then, he was interviewing fellow inmates to gather a font of evidence that would not only form much of the backbone of the testimony at the Nuremberg trials, but which would also provide one of the earliest and most comprehensive personal accounts of life and death in the Nazi dystopia.

Vancouverites have a special connection to Wiesenthal, we could say, in that a former city rabbi is the embodiment of much of Wiesenthal's philosophy and drive. Rabbi Marvin Hier, who left his congregation at Schara Tzedeck to become the founding dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, is a personal connection between this city and the legendary Wiesenthal. Since 1977, the centre has grown to become one of the foremost Jewish human rights agencies in the world.

Wiesenthal will go down in history as more than a Nazi hunter, though that is a label he wore proudly and which is worthy of commendation. His memory and his name will come to represent the struggle for justice in the aftermath of injustice that defies human imagination. There is no recompense for the crimes of the Nazi regime, but Wiesenthal's work was a lifetime of dedication to the concept that, for the sake not only of the past and those lost to history, but for the future of humanity itself, the quest for justice must never cease.

It is difficult to ignore the irony of Wiesenthal's longevity. So narrowly did he escape death in the Shoah that every day for him was an unexpected gift, as it is for so many survivors. Yet he was to survive fully a half-century beyond liberation, time spent seeking justice and ensuring that the memories of those who did come out this side of that terrible epoch are remembered and commemorated in a meaningful way.

For some, commemorating the Holocaust and its victims has meant lifelong commitments to religious, cultural or educational pursuits. For Wiesenthal, that commemoration was embodied in a total immersion in the pursuit of justice on behalf of those millions who did not, like Wiesenthal, survive.

Simon Wiesenthal died Tuesday at the age of 96. May his name be remembered by justice-seeking people everywhere and for all time.

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