Recognizing the Life and Accomplishments of Simon Wiesenthal

RECOGNIZING THE LIFE AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF SIMON WIESENTHAL

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, today we mourn the passing of a great man whose name has become synonymous with the pursuit of justice, Simon Wiesenthal. Mr. Wiesenthal dedicated his life to finding and prosecuting Nazi war criminals, and he was extraordinarily successful at doing so. He was a passionate, courageous man waging an often lonely yet critical fight.

Born 96 years ago in what is now the Ukraine, Mr. Wiesenthal barely survived the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust, emerging from a concentration camp at the end of the war weighing less than 100 pounds. Though the Nazis had not succeeded in taking his life, he had lost 89 members of his family.

Simon Wiesenthal took this incomprehensible grief and turned it into action, embarking on a lifelong quest to find Nazi war criminals and secure justice for their victims. He had already begun this work in the concentration camps, committing to memory details of his captors. After the war, he worked first for the U.S. Army's War Crimes Office and then opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria in 1947, to continue that work on his own. The Center later moved to Vienna, where Mr. Wiesenthal worked every day in a small office building, surrounded by files, meticulously documenting and tracking the guilty. He worked in that office until last year, when his health would no longer permit it.

In his most prominent success, information from Wiesenthal led Israeli agents to capture Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's extermination campaign, in Argentina in 1960. Wisenthal's other high-profile arrests include Anne Frank's captor, Karl Silberbauer, and the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor camps, Franz Stangl. The vast majority of his work, though, was pursuing lesser-known and unknown Nazis and demanding accountability for their roles. In all, he is credited with bringing more than 1,100 Nazi war criminals to justice.

Those prosecutions not only brought punishment to the guilty but also affirmed to the world that justice, even when delayed, must always be done.

As we honor and thank Mr. Wiesenthal for the results of his work, we owe him a special debt for the way he went about that work. Despite his personal tragedy and despite the staggering scale of the atrocities, Mr. Wiesenthal sought, as he said, ``justice, not revenge.'' He broke the cycle of hate and elevated us all. Indeed, one of his strongest hopes was that his work would help us to rise above our history. As he said:

The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defense. Through this we can build, we must build, a defense against repetition.

The 11 million victims of the Holocaust had no finer, more dedicated, more capable advocate than Simon Wiesenthal. The living had no finer example of a hero. Our only solace in his passing is that the 11 million Simon Wiesenthal spoke for can finally say to him today: ``Thank you for remembering us.''

http://thomas.loc.gov/