Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal, honorary KBE, (31 December, 1908 – 20 September, 2005), was an Austrian-Jewish architectural engineer who became a Nazi hunter after surviving the Holocaust.

Early life and World War II

Wiesenthal was born Szymon Wiesenthal in Buczacz, Polish Galicia then a part of Austria-Hungary, now a part of the Lviv Oblast section of Ukraine, to a Jewish merchant family. He graduated from the Technical University of Prague in 1932 after being denied admission to the Polytechnic University of Lwów because of quota restrictions on Jewish students. In 1936, he married Cyla Müller, and they had a daughter, Paulina, who lives in Israel.

Related Topics:
Buczacz - Galicia - Austria-Hungary - Lviv Oblast - Ukraine - Technical University of Prague - 1932 - Polytechnic University of Lwów - Quota - 1936 - Israel

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Wiesenthal was living the largest city in Western Ukraine, Lwów, then Poland (formerly Lemberg, now called Lviv, capital of Ukraine), when World War II began. As a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Lwów was occupied by the Soviet Union on 17 September 1939. Wiesenthal's stepfather and stepbrother were killed by agents of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, as a part of the anti-Polish repressions designed to eliminate all Polish intelligentsia. Wiesenthal was forced to close his firm and work in a factory. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, Wiesenthal and his family were captured.

Related Topics:
Lwów - World War II - Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - Occupied - Soviet Union - NKVD - Secret police - Anti-Polish - Intelligentsia - Nazi Germany - June of 1941

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Simon Wiesenthal survived the Holocaust thanks to the intervention of a man named Bodnar, a Ukrainian auxiliary policeman who, on 6 July 1941, saved him from execution by the Nazis then occupying Lwów, as recalled in Wiesenthal's memoir, The Murderers Among Us, written with Joseph Wechsberg.

Related Topics:
Holocaust - 6 July - 1941 - Nazis - Lwów

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Wiesenthal and his wife were first imprisoned in the Janowska camp in the suburbs of Lwów (now Lviv), where they were forced to work on the local railroad. Members of the Polish resistance movement helped Cyla Wiesenthal escape from the camp and provided her with false papers in exchange for diagrams of railroad junctions drawn by her husband. Cyla Wiesenthal was able to hide her Jewish identity from the Nazis because of her blonde hair and survived the war as a forced-laborer in the Rhineland. Until the end of the war, Simon believed she had perished in the Warsaw Uprising.

Related Topics:
Lviv - Railroad - Polish resistance movement - Rhineland - Warsaw Uprising

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However, Simon Wiesenthal was not as fortunate; although he escaped from Janowska camp in October 1943 (just before the Nazis began killing all of the camp's inmates) he was recaptured in June and after two failed suicide attempts was sent with the 34 remaining prisoners at Janowska camp on a death march through camps in Poland and Germany to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. By the time he was liberated, he had been imprisoned in a total of 12 concentration camps (five of which were death camps) and had barely escaped execution on a number of occasions. Together, Cyla and Simon Wiesenthal lost 89 relatives during the Holocaust.

Related Topics:
1943 - Suicide - Death march - Mauthausen concentration camp - Concentration camp - Death camp

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