Richard Trank’s 2007 profile on Simon Wiesenthal opens
with a clip of a very young Barbara Walters repeating the same question on
every journalist lips at the time ‘isn’t it time to forget?’ She’s asking this
of Holocaust survivor Wiesenthal the intrepid hunter of Nazi War Criminals
who would never ever give up his quest to bring as many of them as possible to justice until
his death at the age of 96 in 2005.
His lifelong work, and the work of his Office that he
formed in 1946 after the Nuremberg War Trials and the US War Crimes Office
started prematurely releasing some Nazi prisoners and then focusing more on the
new threat of Communism, is very well documented. What Trank shows in the 107
mins. of this profile (co-written with Rabbi
Marvin Heir founder/director of the US Wiesenthal Foundation) is the man’s
unshakeable tenacity and courage to doggedly pursue every single war criminal
he could despite encountering such official opposition and often-downright
hostility along the way.
My pre-conception was that Wiesenthal was universally
regarded as a hero and a Saint … and certainly in his final years the highest honors
and accolades were heaped upon him. But
the movie touches on some really ‘negative’ incidents and often without
conclusion or comment, which was confusing to say the least. Such as in 1975
when he released a report of Friedrich Peter’s nazi past. Peter was a leading political figure in
Austria where Wiesenthal was based, Bruno Kreisky the very popular
Austrian Chancellor very volubly him and then publicly called into question the
validity of Wiesenthal’s own history resulting in him being vilified in his own country. Later when ex United Nations
Secretary Kurt Waldheim was attempting to be elected to the Austrian
Chancellery his war past was revealed and he not only lost the election but was subsequently banned from re-entering the States, yet Wiesenthal spoke up for him.
Even if there are questionable patches in Wiesenthal’s
story (and my own instinct says there is not) we cannot fail to recognize and
be eternally grateful for the impeachable bravery of this one man for whom the horrors
of the war never ended as we all got on with our cozy little lives. This is after the man who, amongst his many many achievements, caught Adolf
Eichmann. And that alone should get him
canonized.
Some of the footage is tough to watch, and even if
that doesn't get you perilously close to reaching for the Kleenex, the very
heavy soundtrack will.
B.T.W. its narrated beautifully
by Nicole Kidman.
★★★★★★★★
★★★★★★★★
