Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Simon Wiesenthal

Austrian Holocaust Survivor, Hunter of Nazi War Criminals

"The meaning of life is wrapped up in what will remain after we depart. The meaning of life is to help create a better future... The meaning of life is to be mindful of the past - to always remember - in order to make certain that history’s atrocities are not repeated again and that justice will win."

"Anyone who denies the crimes and genocide of the past is opening up the way for the murders of the future."

"Come, let us do honor to the man who has always honored us."

"Camaraderie ends when crime begins."

"As a believer that all of us are accountable before our creator, I have always believed that when my life is over, I shall meet up with those who perished, and they will ask me, What have you done? At that moment, I will have the honor of telling them; I have never forgotten you."

"Discovering witnesses is just as important as catching criminals."

"For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing."

"For me was the Holocaust not only a Jewish tragedy, but also a human tragedy. After the war, when I saw that the Jews were talking only about the tragedy of six million Jews, I sent letters to Jewish organizations asking them to talk also about the millions of others who were persecuted with us together - many of them only because they helped Jews."

"Freedom is not a gift of heaven, you have to fight for it every day,"

"For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is 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 the Jewish victims. I will fight for justice.'"

"Hatred can be nurtured anywhere, idealism can be perverted into sadism anywhere. If hatred and sadism combine with modern technology the inferno could erupt anew anywhere."

"God must have been on leave during the Holocaust."

"Humor is the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are oppressed to smile at the situation that pains them."

"Human rights is the only ideology that deserves to survive."

"He did not want to be buried in Austria, as he was afraid his grave will be mutilated."

"I didn't forget you."

"I am someone who seeks justice, not revenge... My work is a warning to the murderers of tomorrow, that they will never rest."

"I don't think there is any other solution than constantly coming to terms with the past, and learning from it. There is no point in minimizing guilt in order to make it easier for sons and daughters to bear the failure of their fathers and grandfathers, their mothers and grandmothers."

"I have lost my mother, my father, my five, and ninety relatives in Poland. Poland is for me a cemetery."

"I have received many honors in my lifetime... When I die, these honors will die with me. But the Simon Wiesenthal Center will live on as my legacy."

"I know I am not only the bad conscience of the Nazis. I am also the bad conscience of the Jews. Because what I have taken up as my duty was everybody's duty."

"I have never stated that 'there were no extermination camps on German soil.' This quote is false, I could never have said such a thing."

"If all of us forgot, the same thing might happen again, in 20 or 50 or 100 years,"

"If you know from history the danger, then part of the danger is over because it may not take you by surprise as it did your ancestors."

"I'm here to assure you that our city is prepared to handle these situations... Power was restored to the vast majority of D.W.P. customers, 90 percent, within the first two hours."

"I was over four years in different camps with people from 15 nations: Jews, Gentiles, Gypsies, communists. Through this experience, my view on the Holocaust and the whole problem of Nazism is a lot different from Elie Wiesel, who was only six months in camps and only with Jews."

"Justice for crimes against humanity must have no limitations."

"None of my 'clients' - not Eichmann, not Stangl, not Mengele, and not even Hitler or Stalin - was born a criminal. Somebody had to teach them to hate: maybe the society, maybe the politics, maybe just a Jewish prostitute."

"My cause was justice, not vengeance. My work is for a better tomorrow and a more secure future for our children and grandchildren."

"Technology without hate can be so beneficial for mankind, but in conjunction with hatred, it leads to disaster."

"Should history repeat itself, my example will repeat itself too...and not once, but fifty-fold."

"Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived. The answer I have found for myself (and which need not necessarily be the answer for every survivor) is: I want to be their mouthpiece, I want to keep their memory alive, to make sure the dead live on in that memory."

"That... is why the neo-Nazis had to do anything they could to question its authenticity."

"The combination of hatred and technology is the greatest danger threatening mankind."

"Technology without hatred can be a blessing. Technology with hatred is always a disaster."

"The end was surely near, ... The Nazis killed you only when you were naked, because they knew, psychologically, that naked people never resist."

"The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defense. Through this we can build, we must build a defense against repetition."

"The National Socialist (Nazi) party had 10 million members, of whom at most 150,000 were criminals. It would be grotesque to stick the label of criminal on every former member of the party."

"The only value of nearly five decades of my work is a warning to the murderers of tomorrow, that they will never rest."

"The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it."

"There is no freedom without justice."

"There is no denying that Hitler and Stalin are alive today... they are waiting for us to forget, because this is what makes possible the resurrection of these two monsters."

"The ruling is a victory of history over hate, ... Today's decision definitely places Irving where he belongs -- not as a historian, but as a leading apologist for those who seek to whitewash the most heinous crime in human history."

"To expose the plight of black slaves in Sudan and Mauritania, where today tens of thousands of black people still suffer the scourge of slavery."

"Violence is like a weed - it does not die even in the greatest drought."

"We know that we are not collectively guilty, so how can we accuse any other nation, no matter what some of its people have done, of being collectively guilty?"

"We need partners. We cannot fight against the neo-Nazis alone. We need friends. We can win them by telling them their history, by talking about the others, the millions of people other than the Jews, that the Nazis killed. The Holocaust began with the Jewish. But it did not end with the Jews."

"Was my silence at the bedside of the dying Nazi right or wrong? This is a profound moral question that challenges the conscience of the reader of this episode, just as much as it once challenged my heart and mind. There are those who can appreciate my dilemma, and so endorse my attitude, and there are others who will be ready to condemn me for refusing to ease the last moment of a repentant murderer. The crux of the matter is, of course, the question of forgiveness. Forgetting is something that time alone takes care of, but forgiveness is an act of volition, and only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision. You... can mentally change places with me and ask yourself the crucial question, "What would I have done?""

"What connects two thousand years of genocide? Too much power in too few hands."

"We thought we were going mad, ... Perhaps we feared (or hoped) we were mad already."