Posted on 04/29/2003 10:04:35 AM PDT by knighthawk
It is the start of a well-deserved rest: Simon Wiesenthal, the world's foremost Nazi hunter, announced his retirement earlier this month. In the April issue of Format, an Austrian magazine, the 94-year-old Mr. Wiesenthal proclaims that "my work is done ... I found the mass murderers I was looking for. I survived them all. Those who I didn't look for are too old and sick today to be pursued legally."
Mr. Wiesenthal can look back on his five decades of patient detective work with great pride. By carefully studying wartime records and cultivating informants, he exposed more than 1,000 suspected war criminals. Noting the post-war resurgence of the far right, he repeatedly warned against the spread of the poison of Holocaust denial throughout Europe, North America and the Arabic-speaking world.
Mr. Wiesenthal once told an interviewer how, on his 75th birthday, "my wife urged me to quit, to spend our remaining years without the constant threats of death [from neo-Nazi groups], without all the pressures of my work. But I considered my work incomplete. The confidence that people have in me cannot be transferred. If I quit, I would feel a traitor."
Mr. Wiesenthal can have no reason to feel this way today. His work will continue through the educational endeavours of the international network of Holocaust remembrance centres that bears his name -- with offices in Buenos Aires, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Paris and Toronto.
These repositories of memory constitute an imperishable monument to Hitler's six million Jewish victims and ensure his "fight against forgetting" will go on. Could this extraordinary man -- the "conscience" of the post-war world, as some have called him -- hope to leave a more fitting, or more meaningful, legacy?
I wish him, and his wife, a well deserved and blessed retirement.
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