At at a time when the world has never more needed to heed the whispers of history, when client journalism seeks to sanitise hate speech as a ‘balanced’ opinion, and social media garrulity threatens to trump expertise: then the risible comparison by the American soldier who suggested to a mortally-vulnerable, post-Mauthausen Simon Wiesenthal that life will inevitably comprise two opposing sides “America has Democrats and Republicans… you have Jews and Nazis” seems more horribly apposite than Wiesenthal could ever have realised it might become.
Not an easy watch. nor should it be
Would that we could learn from it.
But the world has never much appreciated poking around in the valuable lessons of the past. A little anger, a lot of sadness, and a hefty dollop of performative grief… and we’re done. Exhorted to ‘move on’ and ‘get over it’ with a concerted and mobilised vigour; there seems almost a global compact to pull the duvet right over our heads and hunker down in a fantasy of funny cat videos and celebrity gossip . Whether too terrified of the reality knowingly being hidden, or too far down the propaganda rabbit hole to believe in resurgent forces of evil is largely irrelevant: the moral sleepwalking which arises from this chilling lack of intellectual curiosity or personal responsibility leads us towards the same avoidable place time and again.
Wiesenthal, then, and those like him are the rarest of breeds. Someone committed to justice, to taking a stand against the darkest of hearts, and prepared to gamble personal safety in a mission to educate those whose unsophisticated equilibrium is so disturbed by the very notion of wickedness that they choose ignorance over obliteration.
Born in 1908 to a Jewish family who had escaped the Russian pogroms, Wiesenthal was working as an engineer and architect when war broke across Europe in 1939. As the subsequent years took their dreadful toll, he and his wife lost a total of eighty-nine family members to the brutal ideologies of the Nazi party. Moved from concentration camp to concentration camp, Wiesenthal was near death when the Mauthausen camp was liberated by USA forces in 1945. And it was there, with red ink smearing his cheeks in a grotesque pretence of health, and weighing just 90lbs that he decided his ‘price’ for remaining alive would be to deputise for those who had been murdered: for the rest of his life. And so he did: becoming the ‘Nazi Hunter’ instrumental in bringing many of the most prolific perpetrators of war crimes to justice in the latter half of the twentieth century. Although quite how instrumental and how much of the time is hard to say, with Wiesenthal’s own memoirs frequently contradicting themselves on the altar of a good story.
Christopher C Gibbs brings Wiesenthal to life with gentleness, humour, and a wonderful sense of ordinariness. An international hero he may be to many; but to his wife, he is just the schmuck who needs to remember to bring some milk home. Indeed, this thread of mundanity runs through Tom Dugan’s immaculately constructed script: forcing us all to consider how we will recognise good (or its counterpart) when we see it. Wiesenthal himself is disappointed by a mild-mannered defendant he has brought to trial, demonstrating an almost visceral need to face a ‘monster’ in the dock. It has never felt more important to flag the very real dangers behind this cosiness of evil: those who prefer to believe that Fascism is too aggressive a word to use in relation to contemporary fascistic behaviours should take note.
This is not an easy watch. Nor should it be. But it wisely resists the temptation to veer towards the sentimental or sensational. Indeed, the sensitivity and almost matter-of-fact recollection of the Holocaust death count is what allows the horror to resonate about the darkened space. The data, in itself, is sobering. As those of us who have paid our respects at these hell sites can attest, few are cursed with the capacity to fully appreciate the weight of what happened to so very many innocent souls. Which, in itself, promotes an even deeper-rooted feeling of unease which we are desperate – but ultimately doomed not – to reconcile.
For while we may cry at the fate of an Anne Frank, or applaud the actions of an Oskar Schindler; a exhaustive realisation of the horrific reality of 11 million dead civilians (Wiesenthal’s preferred statistic, which includes five million gentile executions) is – and arguably should remain – utterly beyond comprehension. Children’s bodies stuffing potholes. Cargo loads of the detritus of human experience. Sheds piled high with hair, and teeth, and prosthetic limbs. On nothing more than the whim of one man and the blind obedience of others.
Dogged in his belief that collective responsibility and ‘just following orders’ are no excuse for such crimes; we are invited into some of Wiesenthal’s most famous cases, framed always by the stories of those he is honouring in his work. But whether perpetrator, faithful adherent, tacit facilitator, or valiant opponent: the conscious decision making at the heart of every act looms large in the piece. Indeed, we are all encouraged to consider whether we deserve to be – as Wiesenthal suggests – ‘trusted’ to honour the lives of others and to carry the torch of their existence into our own futures.
