Laurence Olivier and Ben Kingsley played the Wiesenthal character in the movies, but the real man would never have been taken for James Bond. His flaws were writ large. He was rough, gruff, and sometimes more than a little too puffed up for his own good and the good of his cause. His many sightings of Josef Mengele were sometimes hallucinations or even fabrications. But he contributed information that led to the capture of more than a thousand Nazis, including the unrepentant Adolf Eichmann, who was sent to Israel for a trial and a hangman's rope. He tracked down the Gestapo aide responsible for the arrest of Anne Frank in her hiding place in an attic in Amsterdam.
Mr. Wiesenthal defended Kurt Waldheim when his Nazi past was finally revealed, and he did not always live up to the moral purity he demanded of others. But he brought important discussions of genocide to the public arena. In "The Sunflower," he writes of how he was asked to offer forgiveness to a Nazi soldier dying in a hospital. He describes his confusion and silence, but he doesn't stop there. He asks contemporary thinkers of various religions to read the story and discuss their own feelings. The book has become a primer for teaching students about the Holocaust without the emotional glibness of the popular culture.
Student reactions to his book tell much about their understanding of ethics. Berel Lang, a professor of the humanities, used it to teach college students the concept of evil. In "Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide," he writes how shocked he was at student indifference to Nazi immorality; the students thought the soldier need not ask forgiveness because he was merely a soldier carrying out orders.
Simon Wiesenthal always said he did what he did so the next generation could learn from his experience, "so that it could not happen again." No small accomplishment. We'll miss him.