“The witnesses are slowly dying off, as are the criminals … but if even forty years after the crime we bring a man to justice, it becomes a warning for the murderers of tomorrow.”
Simon Wiesenthal — The Penthouse Interview
Simon Wiesenthal will never forget, nor will he allow the rest of the world to forget, the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. For thirty-eight years, this seventy-four-year-old man has assumed the often thankless task of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice. His work also stands as a memorial to the millions of innocent victims, including eighty-nine members of his own family, who were butchered by the New Order of Adolf Hitler. To date, Wiesenthal has been responsible for bringing more than one thousand war criminals to trial.
It was long before World War II, in his native village of Buchach, now known as the Lvov Oblast section of the Ukraine, that Wiesenthal saw firsthand the tragic results of anti-Semitism. In 1915, when he was seven years old, his village was invaded by soldiers of the Polish and Russian armies. His father, an officer in Emperor Franz Josef’s army, was killed in the assault, and the pogrom that followed forced his mother to flee Vienna with Simon and his younger brother.
In Vienna, Wiesenthal spent his boyhood in relative tranquillity. His mother remarried in 1925, and three years later he graduated from the Gymnasium. He was denied entrance to the Polytechnic Institute in his native Lvov Oblast because of the quota restrictions placed on Jewish students. He then applied and was admitted to the Technical University of Prague, where he received a degree in architectural engineering in 1932.
Wiesenthal, like thousands of other young and optimistic Austrian graduates, planned to establish his own architectural office and get married. For a brief period his optimism and plans seemed justified, and he returned to Lvov Oblast to open his own business and in 1936 married his wife, Cyla. With the coming of World War II, however, Stalin’s dreaded NKVD decided to purge the country’s last vestiges of “bourgeoisie.” Wiesenthal’s stepfather was arrested and died in prison. His only brother was shot. In 1941, the Germans replaced the Soviets and Wiesenthal began his grim journey from concentration camp to concentration camp.
Wiesenthal described this period’s hellish existence in the most famous of his several books, The Murderers Among Us. The horror of this time determined his destiny. Eleven million people had been slaughtered, and Wiesenthal wanted their deaths remembered and their murderers punished for their unspeakable crimes. He was never to return to his calm and ordered existence.
While Wiesenthal’s work is well supported in this country and in Europe, there was a time when hunting Nazis was unpopular. In 1947 Wiesenthal opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria. With the arrival of the cold war, neither the Americans nor the Russians wanted to antagonize the Germans by bringing Nazis to trial, so in 1954 the center closed. Wiesenthal turned over all his files but one, the Adolf Eichmann file, to the Israelis. It was Eichmann’s sensational arrest in 1959 and his trial in Israel that created renewed interest in Nazi war criminals. Wiesenthal was able to reopen the center, this time in Vienna, where it continues to operate today.
This interview was conducted in Vienna for the German edition of Penthouse by Peter Lanz, with additional questions provided by contributing editor Allan Sonnenschein in New York. The German portions of the interview were translated into English by Penthouse chief copy editor David Grambs.
What most impressed Sonnenschein was that Wiesenthal had little anger in his voice and no hatred in his words. According to Sonnenschein, “he reminds one more of a contented and retired businessman than the angry avenger of 11 million souls. He is conservatively dressed in a pin-striped suit, with a neatly trimmed mustache and a more than slight paunch around his middle. It is hard to imagine that the healthy-looking, handsome man sitting across from you was nearly dead from malnutrition when the American army liberated him from the Nazi death camp in Mauthausen.” Peter Lanz, who interviewed Wiesenthal for Penthouse in Vienna, was also struck by the man’s humanity and humility. Wiesenthal told Lanz that when he decided to devote his life’s work to hunting down Nazi war criminals, he had no idea just how difficult the task would prove to be. “I was naive enough to think that justice could be attained in three or four years.” Now, thirty-eight years later, Wiesenthal is aware that he alone will not be able to finish the job.
But he is not dismayed by this, for he sees another, perhaps greater purpose to his work. By not allowing us to forget the crimes of the Nazis, he has also brought the emergence of neo-Nazi groups to the attention of both European and American authorities. Wiesenthal told Sonnenschein that although he was tired from traveling on his lecture tour, it was imperative that Americans be alerted to the rise of a new radical right.
Finally, Sonnenschein asked Wiesenthal if he feared for his life from these radical and terrorist anti-Semitic groups. Wiesenthal smiled and told him how he had learned a few years ago that young terrorists from the Baader-Meinhof gang planned to assassinate him; but when the shadowy international assassin “Carlos,” the Jackal, learned of the plan, he immediately canceled it. The way it was told to Wiesenthal, Carlos’s reasoning was simple: “Wiesenthal is the greatest anti-fascist in the world.”
How did you feel when you got the news that Nazi murderer Klaus Barbie had been captured?
Wiesenthal: I hoped he would be turned over to Germany, because I didn’t want him to become a martyr of the neo-Nazis. His trial should be conducted in a quiet, factual atmosphere, before impartial judges.
That’s a logical explanation, but did you feel anything like joy?
Wiesenthal: It was not joy. It was satisfaction. How can one feel joy when a mass murderer like Barbie comes to justice? It’s rather a sense of satisfaction that someone like him has no chance, even if it takes many years to bring him to trial.
What dealings did Barbie have with the CIA?
Wiesenthal: It was during the time of the cold war. Everyone always said that the cold war would have no winner, but I maintain that the Nazi criminals were the true winners of the cold war. The American intelligence services hardly knew anything about the Eastern Bloc, so they enlisted Germans and Austrians to give them information, even when they were Nazis. I believe Barbie wanted to tell the Americans something about the uranium mines in the Soviet Union. Otherwise, he knew very little of a secret nature.
Which of the major Nazi war criminals are still alive and free?
Wiesenthal: Mengele. But the life that he lives is an imprisonment. He is always surrounded by bodyguards. Then there is also the suspicion of cancer.
So Dr. Mengele is first on your list of the hunted?
Wiesenthal: Yes. A Mengele trial would demonstrate to a whole generation what horrors the concentration camps entailed. Then there would no longer be somebody coming forth to say there were no gas chambers. Even the biggest idiot would laugh at him.
Look, the life of Mengele is absolutely without any importance. After so many years, the criminals change to witnesses, because, after all, you cannot punish what has happened. At every trial, the sentence is only a symbol. How can we punish somebody for the deaths of 400,000 people? The man is now seventy-one, and when he’s caught he’ll get life, and he will probably serve only five or six years before he dies. This will end up to be a few seconds served per victim.
Have you any leads to Mengele?
Wiesenthal: I’ve just missed Mengele five times. On one occasion we knew he left a Mennonite community in Paraguay one day before New Year’s. The Mennonites there are racist Volga Germans from the Baltic. He has been there a couple of times. Up until now he’s remained in the area of Uraguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina. The last time I just missed Mengele was in 1973, in Torremolinos. Penthouse: Were you personally on his trail there?
Wiesenthal: I’m not really suited for that, but I’ve been personally on his track a couple of times. Once I arrived in Milan accompanied by a public prosecutor, where I learned that Mengele had left a day and a half earlier. Another time we got there too early. In Torremolinos my colleagues learned that Mengele and a couple of others were traveling in cars with false. German license plates.
People have said that Mengele is the most vicious Nazi still alive. Do you agree with this?
Wiesenthal: Well, Mengele is the most emotional case. Let me tell you about him. Mengele has two doctor’s degrees, one for philosophy and the other for medicine. He became a soldier and was on the front as an SS doctor, and when he was wounded in 1943 they sent him to Auschwitz. Immediately Mengele saw the possibility of performing experiments on human beings. You see, he looked like a gypsy and this was his personal problem, so he wanted to create a race of blond-haired, blue-eyed people. With this in mind he experimented on the babies in the camps by changing the pigmentation of their hair and the color of their eyes, and then, after the experiments, he killed them by injections. For another experiment he used twins. Twins were brought to Mengele from all over Europe. Why twins? Because he thought that if after the war German women could only have twins, the losses from the war would be brought into a better balance.
On the other hand, he personally selected and sent about 400,000 people to the gas chamber.
But now Mengele has begun to work on his own defense. He told one of my German contacts: “I cannot understand what the world wishes for me. All the people who were sent to Auschwitz were sent to die. I selected some of them for living.” You understand… he selected some who were healthy to work for a few months for the Nazis, and, if you follow his thinking, he should be given the Nobel Prize!
You always have excellent information. Do you have many detectives working for you?
Wiesenthal: In every country I have people who are there for me if I need them. Every day I receive letters with tips and information about Nazis. Naturally I have to follow up on these things before I pass them on to the authorities, and this can’t be done without a certain amount of scrutiny.
Our best informers are the Germans. You know, in Europe, when two Nazis have a quarrel, one threatens the other with, “I will go to Simon Wiesenthal.” This is my biggest satisfaction: that a Jew, whose family the Nazis killed and who was alone for so many years in a concentration camp, sees a time when one Nazi can come to me and say that he knows another Nazi. I don’t think anyone else in the world can get the same satisfaction.
How many people work for you?
Wiesenthal: A couple of girls in my office in Vienna, and a couple of researchers who travel around. In Australia there is a nun working for me; if I need something, I write to her. Of course I have to pay her expenses, since a nun has no money. I have other people in Brazil who are so rich they would be angry if I were to offer them money. Elsewhere I pay for any loss of earnings. I hardly work at all with actual detectives. In South America that would cost an unheard-of amount of money, and the person might go right away to the man he was hired to watch and cash in twice.
Tell us how you found Eichmann.
Wiesenthal: That was in 1953, in Argentina. You know, I’m a philatelist. In stamp collecting you come into contact with people you would otherwise never meet. It is a passion that runs through all levels of society. And so it was through a philatelist that I received the information about Eichmann’s whereabouts. I immediately turned it over to Israel and New York, to the Jewish World Congress. They sent me an answer saying that the news had to be false, since the FBI had information that Adolf Eichmann was living in Damascus at that time. It wasn’t until six years later that the Israelis received similar information from the general state prosecutor in Frankfurt. They came to me, and I was able to help fill in some remaining gaps. Today nobody claims that he was singly responsible for finding Eichmann. It was teamwork by people who didn’t even know one another, who each had one stone to contribute to the mosaic.
How many arrests have you provided the evidence for?
Wiesenthal: Approximately eleven hundred. That’s a lot when you hear the number, but not so many when you think it represents thirty-eight years of work. Once, while I was on vacation, one of my associates drew up a progress report, with a diagram showing how many years of imprisonment came out of my trials, how many were imprisoned, and so forth. And I got angry with him. I said, “Why are you making a competitive sport out of our work? You can’t fabricate statistics out of blood and tears.”
Then you don’t want to collect statistics of the atrocities with your Documentation Center, but rather to build a historical foundation?
Wiesenthal: We are seeking witnesses who have something to say about the events that took place between 1933 and 1945, and the people who participated. In this way future historians will not have one-sided information. It’s turned out that the reminiscences and memoirs that many people wrote after the war are for the most part useless. There are names that have been mixed up — because people did not always introduce themselves with business cards, and the person who sat in the ghettos and the camps knows only his own tormentors and not those who gave the initial orders. So, we are putting together material for historians, and to this end we give many subsidies to people who wish to write something that is not yet known about the period. At present we’re underwriting a book about the Italian SS.
There are some in Germany who believe that there will come a time when a final line on all this must be drawn.
Wiesenthal: The witnesses are slowly dying off, as are the criminals, so that everything is taking its course, biologically speaking. However, as long as the persecutors and the persecuted from those times remain alive, the work will continue. I see it as a warning to tomorrow’s murderers. They should know that they have no chance of escape, not even if they’re holed up 6,000 miles away.
The courts don’t always go along with this theory.
Wiesenthal: There exist no perfectly balanced scales of justice. Eichmann said at one point that a hundred dead is a catastrophe, a million dead, a statistic. I agree with that a hundred percent. Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl has said more to the consciences of people than all of the Nuremburg trials. So has the television series “Holocaust.” One can identify with an individual fate, but not with 11 million dead in the concentration camps. That is why the neo-Nazis have so vehemently opposed the Anne Frank diary. It took me five years before I found the man who had arrested Anne Frank.
And where did you find him?
Wiesenthal: In Vienna. With the police department. He was a Viennese. Ultimately, he was simply transferred from street duty to an office job, that was all.
Did he know about the diary?
Wiesenthal: Yes. He had bought it and read it, but it didn’t make any impression on him. If he had discovered the original diary in Amsterdam, he would have destroyed it. People don’t think, especially those who were in the SS. They check their consciences right at the door. We succeeded in bringing eleven hundred Nazis in different countries to court and I don’t know exactly, but I think the defendants pleaded guilty in three or maybe five cases. The others reacted just as Barbie has — they were sorry for every Jew that they didn’t kill. In fact, the only thing they regretted was leaving so many witnesses alive. It’s a lost part of a generation. If they were young today and if circumstances were just the same, they’d do it all over again, only this time they wouldn’t leave any witnesses.
“Eichmann said that a hundred dead is a catastrophe, a million dead is a statistic…. One can identify with an individual fate, but not with 11 million dead in the camps.”
And today in Germany there are many young people who feel drawn to the Nazis.
Wiesenthal: That’s why today we must shift our work to deal largely with this most acute danger. The neo-Nazis are not just a German problem. There are right-wing extremists all over the world. What happened in Germany was that while the extreme leftists were being fought, the right eye went blind. I was once standing at a taxi stand in Stuttgart, and I heard a man say, “Hitler may have been a criminal, but all of this couldn’t have been possible.” For a long time the leftist terrorist groups brought crowds to the Nazis. Things are even worse elsewhere. In Argentina the police have helped rebuild the right extremists so that they can better restrain the leftist extremists. This is also happening in Italy. From the beginning the right-wing extremists were welcome there since they took some of the burden off the executive office in its fight against the Red Brigades.
Years ago I wrote letters to Helmut Kohl and to Willy Brandt, warning them of such things. Brandt answered that he agreed with me, and Kohl initiated a small inquiry in the Bundestag. But like always, the problem was kept under the table. Nevertheless, when I meet German diplomats I often ask, “Why do you allow the image of the Germans in other countries to be represented by a couple of hundred Nazi scrawlers? What are 30,000 neo-Nazis against 30 million good young people?” And they answer — especially those who once had to emigrate — “You know, the Germans have not changed.” That’s not true!
Who finances the Nazi propaganda?
Wiesenthal: I’ve written about this to a very noble man, Attorney General William French Smith, whom I met last year to talk about the Nazi problem in the United States. Later I saw in the newspapers that he was in Pakistan and in India seeking cooperation in the war against drug dealers, so I sent a letter about these people in the United States who distribute hatred around the world. At the end of my letter, I said, “What you have done against the drug dealers is very important and I believe in every step you’ve taken. But from the other side you must know that the Nazis killed more innocent people in one month than all the drug dealers of the world have in ten years.” I asked him to do something to stop this flow of hatred from people who are not only misusing the First Amendment but are misusing the reputation of the United States. On every leaflet and on every brochure, you can see the words printed in the United States.
In America there exists the unimpeachable right to freedom of expression. Things are printed against the Jews that in Vienna would get somebody thrown into prison if they were distributed.
Is there a significant Nazi party in the United States?
Wiesenthal: There are over 100 organizations — Nazi organizations or right-wing groups. They have a big weekly newspaper in Washington called Spotlight. These groups also have other small monthlies or bimonthlies, but mainly they reprint in German all the Nazi books, especially the ones that speak against Jews. They sell them for three or four dollars, and they have a mailing list in Germany of maybe 60,000 or 80,000 people. So understand, when you reprint a book, you cannot reprint one copy. You reprint 500 or 1,000 copies. And when you reprint 100 different books the big question is, Who pays for it?
Who does?
Wiesenthal: We couldn’t manage to find out. We know only that there are people doing it. They have nothing. The front man is always a nothing, a wimp. A person who lives in poor circumstances, yet every year sends away for a hundred thousand leaflets. The man who made the attempt on President Reagan’s life, Hinckley, was part of such a Nazi group for six months. There are so many names to discuss. You hear about involvement by oil millionaires, Texas millionaires. Many also think that the Arabs are behind it, but I don’t believe that, because in the United States the blacks are abused as well as the Jews, and the Arabs would not stand for that.
Some people who distributed this literature are now in jail. In Sweden, one person got ten months. In Germany, one got three years, eight months, for distributing propaganda that said that the Holocaust never existed and that the gas chambers were only for the disinfection of cIothes. In many cases these people claimed that they had received the literature from the United States.
what do you think the United Statesgovernment should do about neo-Nazi parties? Do you think it should allow their existence, that outlawing the parties would be a violation of our Constitution?
Wiesenthal: You need what we have in Europe, in all the countries: a law against racial hatred. It should not destroy the First Amendment, because the First Amendment is so beautiful … it could not be better. The First Amendment guarantees individual freedom, but this freedom also has a border, where the freedom of another individual begins. When people cross the border, they should be stopped.
There are some groups, like the White Power group, that have ten times the members that Hitler’s group had in the beginning. They are waiting for a crisis, because they hope that what happened in the twenties or in the thirties will happen again.
Thisshould be stopped, so that the enemies of the U.S. cannot say, “Look, this is the great country of democracy, and this is possible.”
is the anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union the same as the Nazi anti-Semitism here and elsewhere?
Wiesenthal: Anti-Semitism has many faces. Of course, the Nazis were worse, because theirs was a direct genocide. But in the soviet union, there is spiritual genocide of the Jews. They wish the Jews would disappear. There are no schools for Jews, no theatre, no newspapers, nothing. Absolutely nothing. Under these circumstances, it is a big miracle that young Jewish Russians know that they are Jews. The anti-Semites make them Jews?
So they are more aware of their religion than American Jews?
Wiesenthal: Yes, because they suffer for it, they pay for it. The young American Jews have it for nothing. In 1964 or 1965, I was invited to the Soviet embassy for the anniversary of revolution. I came in contact with a Russian diplomat, who knew a little about me, and he asked if he could visit me. The next morning at nine o’clock, my secretary came into my room and saw there was a man waiting for me who refused to give his name. It was this Russian diplomat. He asked me to close my door, and he sat down and didn’t say one word for a long time. Then he began to cry. His tears were like the rain you see through the window now. I was shocked and in Russian I asked the man to tell me what had happened. He said, “Nothing special. This is the first time that I can cry as a Jew. No one knows that I’m Jewish.
My own children don’t know. Only my wife knows.” We talked for maybe an hour, and I let him cry, because it was like therapy. I never saw him again.
Are you everafraid for your own safety?
Wiesenthal: Every week I receive two or three threatening letters. Today one arrived from America. You get used to it. When a week goes by and I don’t receive any threatening letters, I feel that something is missing. Do you know what I do with the letters? I file all of them under the letter M.
What does “M” stand for?
Wiesenthal: “M” stands for meschugge, “crazy” You know the person who really wants to do something to me wont write me ahead of time. The people who left a bomb in front of my house a couple of months ago didn’t send an announcement first. They were serious about what they were doing.
Have you been attacked often?
Wiesenthal: Once a Jewish man who had been a Kapa [ or member of the Kamaradschafts Polizei, concentration camp inmates serving as a disciplinary staff under the SS] came at me with a knife. I had had him locked up because he was guilty of the deaths of many inmates. When he was freed, he tried to get revenge. I threw a bottle of ink in his face, and that’s what saved me. Often the federal police warn me when they get information about a plotted attempt against me. I have weapons in my office and at home. I like the Colt, but I know that I will never be the first to shoot.
Have you received assassination threats in other countries?
Wiesenthal: In Germany, never, never. In Canada, yes, and above all in the U.S.A. In Texas the police wanted my assurance that I would wear a bulletproof vest when I spoke before students. I refused. In Chicago, I was speaking before 1,500 students when twenty boys in uniform came up to grab me. They wanted to mop up the floor with me. If the stupid rascals hadn’t come in uniforms, they probably would have succeeded. It goes without saying that anybody who lives the kind of life I live has to take such things as part of the bargain. It wouldn’t be normal if it weren’t true.
Have you ever resorted to physical force?
Wiesenthal: There was one instance, and I’ll never forget it. A rather pretty, half-Jewish woman came to me. She told me she had suffered. I asked her for details. “Good, I’ll bring them to you,” she replied. A few days after, two men brought over a large trunk. “This is my evidence,” the woman said to me. And then she told me her story. She had been a student at the Gymnasium — she had a Christian up-bringing — and there she had met another student and they had married. In 1933 her husband became a Nazi and under party pressure had to divorce her. Their love turned to hate. She worked at the state railway office, and each day her husband sent her two or three postcards at the payroll division, where she worked. On them he pasted slogans, mottoes from Der Sturmer and other Nazi pamphlets. Everybody saw them, and she saved them all. I sent for the man. I knew that he had tormented the poor woman for a period of seven years in a way that he could not be legally punished for. So I spit in his face.
Did you know while you were in the concentration camps that if you survived, you would make the full and complete documentation of the Holocaust your life’s work?
Wiesenthal: Perhaps unconsciously. I recently saw in Washington an old letter I had written, a week after liberation, to the American commander at our camp in Mauthausen, with the names of all the people I knew of who had committed war crimes. We all stayed for a period in the camp after the Americans came. The letter came into my hands because Kirk Doug las in Hollywood wanted to do a film of my life and therefore had had all the material about me collected.
Your daughter was born in 1946. Did you see her birth as an act of hope against all the terrible things you’d gone through?
Wiesenthal: My wife and I saw that we were alone in the world. All our relatives were dead. If we wanted to have survivors, there had to be a family, a child. When my daughter was ten years old, she came home one day before Christmas, very upset, and said, “What kind of people are we? Every kid has a grandma, a grandpa, an aunt, and goes to visit them. How is it that I’m alone? Why have I never seen any relatives?” Do you know what I did? I gave my child no answer but went into another room and wept. It was this incident that first made me realize how poor my child is. That evening I called up a friend in Vienna and described my problem to him. I told him to call up the next day as a cousin and invite her to Vienna. And so, with the help of friends, I created a family for her. I didn’t tell her the whole story until she was fourteen years old.
How did you explain to your daughter that she was living in the same country that had put you in a concentration camp?
Wiesenthal: I told her that one can fight malaria only where it breaks out.
What satisfaction do you get, in the end, after the people you have helped track down are sentenced?
Wiesenthal: It’s not a matter of satisfaction. When you look at history, you see that the history of man is a history of crimes. History can repeat itself. The fact is that if forty years after the crime we catch such a man and bring him to justice, it becomes a warning for the murderers of tomorrow.
Do you think the Holocaust could ever happen again?
Wiesenthal: When it was possible for it to happen in a nation as rich with culture as Germany, it could happen in any country of the world. And this is the big danger. By the end of this year I will be seventy-five years old. I’m still going to universities to talk to young people, and I will still say to them, “For your benefit, learn from our tragedy.” It’s not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people. We saw it begin, in Germany, with Jews, but people from more than twenty other nations were also murdered. When I started this work, I said to myself, “I will look for the murderers of all the victims, not only of the Jewish victims. I will fight for justice.”
There are a number of people in the United States within the circle of Holocaust survivors who don’t understand that this is very, very important. I have fought against the Jewish internal propaganda about the Holocaust because, first of all, I want to present our tragedy as a human tragedy. And second, I don’t want to reduce the whole of Nazism to a Jewish problem, as the survivors have done by separating themselves from other victims.
That has been done?
Wiesenthal: Yes, sure. Because when we fight against a repetition of the Holocaust, we cannot fight alone. We need the survivors from the other nations or their children or their families to help us fight. The survivors themselves understand this, but their so-called leadership here in the United States doesn’t.
Do you mean Elie Wiesel?
Wiesenthal: Yes, he is the biggest opponent of my position that there should be a brotherhood of the victims. Of all the victims.
Why doesn’t Wiesel agree with you?
Wiesenthal: He’s a chauvinist. And I am not. The big secret is that I am not a hater.
How can that be after all you have seen in your lifetime?
Wiesenthal: I cannot hate, and I never in my whole life have accused a whole nation. I never accused all the Germans, because I do not wish to hear somebody say “all the Jews.”
You didn’t hate the Nazis even after what they did to your family?
Wiesenthal: No, no. In my opinion, no one is born a criminal. The life picture of an individual is created by three components: parents, school, church. Later comes the fourth component: society. When one of these facets is bad, the life picture is destroyed. During the Nazi period, there were many cases where all four components were bad. For many people with sadistic inclinations, there was the possibility to commit crimes without having to take responsibility. After the war, I arrested many people and I saw their dossiers. I was in their homes, I read their letters. And there was one man, I remember, who got life imprisonment. He told his wife in a letter that there was a big hole at a Russian airport, and as there was no chance to make it an airfield again, they were going to kill fifteen hundred Jews and put them in the hole. And in the same letter he asked about his child, about the flowers in the garden, and so on. Okay, you can say these people were mentally destroyed, but there were many of them. What I have against these people is something physical. I don’t want to come into physical contact with them. But it isn’t hatred.
What is it?
Wiesenthal: I don’t know what it is, but there were many occasions when these people could have been killed. And I prevented the killing.
Why?
Wiesenthal: Why? Because our world is very small. And our children are condemned to live with their children.
Do you sometimes manage to laugh?
Wiesenthal: Yes. You know, I once wrote a book about humor. Under a pseudonym.
Really?
Wiesenthal: Yes. Humor is the weapon of the defenseless — or so I put it in the book. And earlier, when I was studying in Prague, I was the master of ceremonies for the student theater. I had a joke for every situation. That is my life-affirming nature.
Can you recall a moment in your concentration camp experiences about which you were able to laugh?
Wiesenthal: No. Not in any of the camps that I was in. There the officials laughed, not us. In the ghetto I’d hear jokes. The Jewish joke has the quality of Jews healing their wounds while they ridicule the situations that have inflicted these wounds on them.
You know, I was once in the Kruger National Park in South Africa with my wife. And there we saw some well-fed lions, and near them were a certain number of gazelles. And I said to my wife, “You see, that’s the difference between animals and men. An animal takes only what he needs. A man takes more.”
Although he had nothing to do with its founding, the Simon Wiesenthal Center honored him with its name when it began in 1977. The Center continues to flourish with its now (soon) multiple Holocaust Museums as well as an Academy Award-winning film division. If you wish to see how Mr. Wiesenthal “ended” his search for Nazis, The Jerusalem Post featured as fitting a tribute to a single man as we rarely see. Not all of life even remotely qualifies as fun, but we can all reach fulfillment when we find our purpose.
