Skip to main content

Wiesenthal’s Revenge

Franz Stangl


Dusseldorf, 22 Dec 1970. The court finds a 62-year-old man named Franz Stangl guilty of genocide and sentences him to life imprisonment. As soon as the verdict is passed, another man present in the courtroom takes out his wallet. pulls out a photo of Stangl, tears it up into pieces and throws it into a dustbin before walking out of the room nonchalantly. That man is Simon Wiesenthal.

Wiesenthal is the man who tracked Stangl for about 20 years in order to bring him to justice. He ferreted out more than 1000 Nazi criminals and brought them to justice. With cool determination and total dedication. Why? Wiesenthal was a survivor of the Holocaust. He lost his family members, except his wife, to the Nazi genocide which killed over 6 million Jews with state support. The government becoming a mass murderer is the ultimate degeneration of a nation. When murder is made a virtue by the government, humanity itself dies without a second thought. People become murderers happily. They think killing is their obligation, a holy act. 

Simon Wiesenthal

Franz Stangl was the highest-ranking official of a death camp in West Germany. He ordered the death of 400,000 Jews. At the trial, he said indifferently, “I was only doing my duty.” Yes, he was only doing his duty sanctioned by his government. He killed 400,000 people including innocent children and he thought he was doing his duty. This is what Hannah Arendt later called the banality of evil. Evil becomes banal when it acquires an unthinking and systematic character.

While in prison, Stangl was interviewed by an investigative journalist and historian. Stangl asserted in the interview that his conscience was clear about what he did. The interviewer gave him time to feel what he was saying. Slowly, Stangl accepted that he was suppressing all his guilt feelings and the little goodness that had been there in his heart until he chose to become a mass murderer. “I was there,” he said. “So yes, in reality I share the guilt.” He took some more time. He reflected a moment and then said, “My guilt… my guilt… is that I am still here. That is my guilt.”

He died of heart failure 19 hours after the conclusion of that interview. He died in prison. That was Simon Wiesenthal’s revenge.

Wiesenthal was motivated by revenge in the beginning when he took upon himself the mission of finding out people like Franz Stangl and bringing them to justice. Later, however, he realised that revenge was destructive and futile. He saw his mission as bringing justice to the victims of the Holocaust. He thought it was his obligation towards history. He spent his entire post-war life fulfilling that mission. Wiesenthal died in his sleep at the age of 96 in 2005.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles is named in his honour. It is a Jewish human rights organisation known for Holocaust research and remembrance, combating anti-Semitism, tolerance education, and so on. There is something aggressive about this Centre’s defence of Jewish rights. After all, it carries the spirit of Simon Wiesenthal whose primary motive was revenge. But Wiesenthal also showed us that we can sublimate our vindictive feelings by changing the focus from revenge to justice. 


PS. I’m participating in BlogchatterA2Z

Previous Post: Vamana’s Deception

Tomorrow: Xenophobic Delights

 

 

Comments

  1. The Holocaust was a time of intense suffering for the Jews who were murdered with impunity. Thank you for writing this post on Wiesenthal. It is such an interesting read!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Wiesenthal showed how we can change our bitterness into a self-healing passion.

      Delete
  2. Such a grt man Weisenthel is..revenge to justice shift. What a grt lesson..wish many applied it? Also that mention of mindless killing becoming banal ..so painful and true!


    Dropping by from a to z "The Pensive"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That man lived a long life because he had a clear and good vision.

      Delete
  3. I really liked that last line. This post reminded of The Boy in Striped Pajamas...Bruno's father Ralf.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Vengeance is a common problem today in our country. We are wreaking vengeance even on history. So Wiesenthal can teach us much.

      Delete
  4. "The government becoming a mass murderer is the ultimate degeneration of a nation" - Can't agree more...

    ReplyDelete
  5. It happened in the past. It happened recently in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. It will happen in the future. History never stopped creating crooks.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...