Simon Wiesenthal

When I heard this morning that Simon Wiesenthal had died, a sort of chill went through me.

As the years pass, there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors remaining to tell their tale and be a living testament to the atrocities that took place during World War II. Growing up Jewish, the history of the Holocaust is part and parcel of my education and something that lurks intermittently in the back of my mind. But there are too many people in the world today who can easily deny the genocide that occurred and soon there will be no one left who saw these things with their own eyes.

After having been put into 5 concentration camps, Wiesenthal managed to survive long enough to be rescued by American troops and ever since has been a strident and important voice in the fight to bring to justice those that tried to escape it and remind us all never to forget.

With him gone, we lose one of our generation's most vital figures and I worry what the future, so far removed from what Simon Wiesenthal saw, will bring.