Suzanne Fields:
Simon Wiesenthal weighed 97 pounds when American soldiers rescued him from the Mauthausen concentration camp in May 1945. His body was more fragile than his memory, and he could not expect to survive. Nevertheless, he did, and he was able to hand over a handwritten list of Nazis he knew to have participated in the Holocaust.
He survived, and so did his mission to pursue the purveyors of unspeakable evil to the ends of the earth. Simon Wiesenthal hunted Nazis like the Nazis hunted Jews. His first motives were rooted in revenge -- and why not? -- but soon motive morphed into mission, the pursuit of justice and the necessity to teach the next generation about what had happened in civilized, oh-so-refined Germany.
"To young people here, I am the last," he told an interviewer in Vienna a decade ago. "I'm the one who can still speak. After me, it's history."
History began last week, when Simon Wiesenthal died at the age of 96. His voice is still at last, but his testimony survives. His life spanned decades of changing trends and attitudes toward the study of the Holocaust. He was a major figure, identified with both the sensationalizing and even occasionally trivializing of the Holocaust, but fulfilling what he believed to be his personal obligation to speak for the dead who could not speak for themselves.
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