Simon Wiesenthal: Tireless pursuit of justice Simon Wiesenthal
survived the Nazi death camps, but was haunted for the rest of
his life by the need to track down those responsible for them.
Born in Lviv, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, into a
family of Orthodox Jews, Simon Wiesenthal survived the Soviet
invasion of the area in the late 1930s, and suffered the arrival
of the Nazis in 1941. As a young architect, Wiesenthal watched
his mother being transported away for execution. He believed his
wife Cyla had died too. In fact, she had escaped persecution by
pretending to be a Pole. He spent four years in concentration
camps, once spared by a firing squad that stopped before it
reached him. As the advancing Red Army pushed into Germany,
Wiesenthal was forced to march westwards by his SS guards. The
survivors of this arduous trek were liberated, finally, by
American troops at the Mauthausen camp in Austria, in May 1945.
He cried from loneliness and then dictated a list of 91 names of
camp officials. He l