Christian Tyler finds out Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal's judgement on the past and hopes for the future
An armed guard sat outside the old man's office. His house is guarded, too, because neo-Nazis threw a bomb at it 12 years ago. But the death threats have dwindled. "I only get one a fortnight now." Simon Wiesenthal said. He grinned. "I almost miss them."
In Europe, the embers of an age-old persecution still flicker, even as the atrocities of a new one are uncovered in the meadows and police cells of Kosovo.
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Persecution, war crimes and tribunals are something Wiesenthal knows all about. "I have been working on this for 50 years," he said. "I study this like other people study medicine, and I believe that in the matter I am a good doctor."
The celebrated Nazi-hunter is one of the oldest living survivors of Hitler's concentration camps. He was born at the end of 1908 in the Polish Galician town of Buczacz - then under the Austro-Hungarian empire - was enslaved and nearly killed by the Third Reich, and settled at last with his wife Cyla in Vienna, only to find himself surrounded by unrepentant Nazis.
His office by the Danube canal is in an undistinguished modern building on the former site of the Metropole Hotel, the Gestapo's wartime headquarters. Across the road stands a monument to victims of "the house of the Gestapo, the antechamber of death". On its stone lintel are inscribed a red triangle and a yellow star with the injunction "Never Forgef".
He never forgets. Seated at his desk in his secret archive of other men's guilty secrets, he faces a wall map of Europe used by post-war German prosecutors to trace the course, of Hitler's 'final solution'. Behind him, incongruously, is a sunflower in a pot.
Is it possible, I asked him, that persecutions will ever cease?
"There is always this illusion that one side only has the truth and there is no place for the other," he replied. "So persecution becomes an important component of some people's existence."
Will it always be like this? "I hope for my children, my grand-children, that they will have another life to the one I had, that they will live in another world."
What do we have to do to make that possible?
"One of my last books was called Justice, not Vengeance. May be the first year after my liberation I was thinking of vengeance. Then I said, "No. I will not be the prosecutor and the judge."
You mean we must retain a sense of justice without ourselves becoming the judges?
"Sure. Because you see how dictatorship develops. The first enemy is justice."
I referred to the monument outside his office. How does memory help, I asked, if people have continued to remember to persecute the Jews?
'I will tell you. The Jews during this century made always the same mistake. They forget what happened a generation before, and so were not ready to fight. Through this, the mistake was repeated so many times. The Jews were so full of belief in the new century, the new culture. Later, they paid the bill."
Can it happen again?
"It can happen again. It is a matter of circumstance. The circumstances were not exactly the same during all those centuries. There is no written law that persecution should be against Jews. It can be against any minority."
Wiesenthal regards the case of the Jews - Christianity's 1,700-year persecution followed by Hitler's godless genocide - as exceptional. Yet he has made enemies among his own people, especially in the US, for speaking out for other victims such as non-Jewish Poles and the gypsies. "My propaganda is 11 million, of which 6 million were Jews," he said.