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Simon Wiesenthal

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Simon Wiesenthal According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, a “champion” is a person who fights for, or speaks in support of, a group of people or a belief. Also, the concept of “injustice” can be defined as the fact of a situation being unfair and of people not being treated equally. Simon Wiesenthal fits the definition of a champion in the fight against injustice because he stood up for his beliefs as a Nazi hunter. In my opinion, Simon Wiesenthal embodies the characteristics of a champion against injustice in terms of being a survivor, being a Nazi hunter, and founding the Jewish Historical Documentation Center. One of his important characteristics is being survivor. According to the reference book Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide, Simon Wiesenthal was born on December 31, 1908, in Buczacs as a Jew. In 1936, he married Cyla Mueller and worked in an architectural office in Lvov. But their life was turned into misfortune because of the beginning of World War II. In 1941, he and his wife were assigned to the forced labor camp by the Nazis, and his mother was sent to Belzc death camp. While most of his and his wife’s relatives were dead; a total of eighty-nine families were killed, he was still alive although he was sent several camps. In 1945, he was liberated by an American armored unit and was a survivor of very few who survived. This fact made up his mind to be a Nazi hunter against injustice. Being a Nazi hunter is also his important characteristic. As soon as his health recovered, he began gathering and preparing evidence on Nazi atrocities. He also worked for the Army’s Office of Strategic Service and Counter-Intelligence Corps and headed the Jewish Central Committee of the United States Zone of Austria, a relief and welfare organization. According to information from nytimes.com, One of his priority cases was Karl Silberbaur, the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank. In 1966, sixteen SS officers, nine of them were founded by Wiesenthal, and he also succeeded in capturing Karl Silberbaur. Wiesenthal’s tracking human-rights abuses were evaluated as champion. According to his autobiography Justice, not vengeance, The Jewish Historical Documentation Center was opened in 1947 by Wiesenthal and thirty volunteers for the purpose of assembling evidence for future trials. Their work was enormous. Germany’s war criminal files contained more than 90,000 names, and most of them were not tried to search. Thousand of former Nazis, not reached in any other files, are also known as large. Wiesenthal accomplished much before he died in 2005, including founding the Simon Wiesenthal Center to teach the Holocaust for future generations and introducing the Academy Award-winning documentary, Genocide, narrated by Elizabeth Taylor and the late Orson Welles. Throughout his long life, he is worth to be considered to be the person who is a champion in the fight against injustice.

Works Cited
Farnsworth, Clyde. “Simon Wiesenthal” Nytimes.com. 2 Feb. 2008. Web. 3 Dec. 2010.
Horvitz, Leslie Alan., and Christopher, Catherwood. Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide. New York: Facts on File, 2006. Print.
Wiesenthal, Simon. Justice, not vengeance. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989. Print.

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