Man With a Mission

Several decades ago, Simon Wiesenthal, a Jewish survivor of the Nazi genocide, sat down to Sabbath services with a fellow camp survivor. Simon's friend, a wealthy jeweler, asked him why he had not resumed his vocation as an architect and become rich. Instead, Simon had devoted his life to documenting Nazi atrocities and hunting down the perpetrators in order to bring them to justice.

"You're a religious man," Wiesenthal told his friend. "You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?' there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler.' Another will say, 'I smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.' Another will say, 'I built houses.' But I will say, 'I didn't forget you.' "

Simon Weisnethal died in 2005 at the age of 96. Relentless and controversial, he once said,"I'm doing this because I have to do it. I am not motivated by a sense of revenge. Perhaps I was for a short time in the very beginning. . . . Even before I had had time to really think things through, I realized we must not forget. If all of us forgot, the same thing might happen again, in 20 or 50 or 100 years."

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