Below The Fold

Less than eight hours ago, they buried Simon Wiesenthal.
I will say a Kaddish for him tonight.
Simon Wiesenthal’s death is a benchmark of sorts. It closes a chapter of the Holocaust—if not the book—in a way that little else can.
He was one of a dwindling number of survivors. None remain in my family that I know of. In fact, I don’t believe any of my family who remained in Europe made it out alive. My grandfather on my mother’s side, Willie, had 10 brothers and sisters. After the holocaust, there was only him and one brother. My Nana, Sadie, had eight siblings. After the holocaust, there were five.
On my father’s side, the entire village near Kiev where his father’s family was from was razed. No one survived. The nazis rolled over them like a bulldozer.
Nana and Grandpa spoke with thick Hungarian accents and carried a sadness with them the rest of their lives. They were the most devoted and loving grandparents a child could have, and I wish I could have known them now—that I could talk about the old country and our family history with them. But even when I broached the topic as a child, I remember the haunted look in their eyes, the tremendous loss they felt, the survivor’s guilt they struggled with.
Simon Wiesenthal helped ease some of their pain. He brought some sense of justice back from a time where it was trampled. He was a nazi hunter, a man who spent the rest of his life tracking down nazis and making them face their own evil—acknowledge the atrocities they committed.
There’s an old fable about a man named Reb Zallman:

“The Baal Shem Tov, the great 18th c. Chasidic master, dreams that in the world to come, Reb Zalman will be the Baal Shem Tov’s neighbor. He decides that he must meet this man to see why Reb Zalman is so special and why he merits this place in the world to come. The Besht arrives just as Shabbat is coming and expects Reb Zalman to welcome him for the day. Instead the Besht finds Reb Zalman in all his grandeur, seated at a table filled with ridiculous amounts of food. Reb Zalman is so busy feeding his face that he does not even stop to acknowledge the Besht. Suffice it to say that this continues on for the entire Shabbat – the Besht trying to interact with Reb Zalman, and Reb Zalman maintaining his solitary interest in stuffing his face. Finally, as Shabbat ends and the Besht makes his way to leave, he is able to get Reb Zalman to acknowledge him and is able to ask why Reb Zalman acts in this manner. Reb Zalman explains that when he was a boy the Cossacks came to take his father … and they tied him up and burnt him at the stake. When they did so, the fire that emanated from his father’s body was trivial and brief. From that day, Reb Zalman swore that when they came to take him and tied him to the stake, there would be a fire so great that the entire world would know that a Jew had been killed.”
(From a sermon given by Rabbi Adam K. Morris, September, 2003)

What’s important about this story is the way it captures so much of the old word, European Jew—the quiet anger and resigned acceptance of the evil that befalls them. Reb knows he’s going to die at the hands of the Cossacks. Instead of trying to mount a defense or even flee, he just wants his death to carry meaning to others—hopefully someone will see the flame and then, maybe they’ll help.
Simon Wiesenthal saw those flames. In 12 different camps (all told, there were more than 40 collection points, prisons, labour and death camps in Eastern Europe). Places like Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Lwow, Theresienstadt, Treblinka.
Auschwitz.
Wiesenthal remembered the orange glow of those flames, and let them burn inside him for the rest of his life as he tracked down those nazis who fled Allied prosecution and he made them face those few who had survived their onslaught.
Wiesenthal showed the rest of the Jewish world that the only people who care about the fire is us, and it’s up to us to make sure it never goes out. Pretty much up until the last year of his life, he fought doggedly and tirelessly against the evil that would snuff our people out.
God bless you and keep you holy, Simon Wiesenthal. You don’t have to fight any longer.
Rest.