Imagine the life of Simon Wiesenthal. It is 1939 and you are a happily married, young, up-and-coming architect in the small Polish city of Lvov - life is good.
Then, the Red Army invades, and your stepfather and stepbrother are killed by the Russians. Two years later and the Russians have been replaced by the Germans. Simon Wiesenthal and his wife Cyla are transported to a forced labour camp while Simon's mother is sent to the concentration camp of Belzec where she later dies. Simon eventually ends up at the infamous concentration camp in Mauthausen, Austria while Cyla manages to escape and go into hiding in Warsaw. Now fast forward to the end of World War II, and while watching former SS guards being interrogated by the allies, Simon Wiesenthal realizes that he would like to help the investigators gather information on the war crimes carried out.
What follows is a lifetime given up to the pursuit of those Nazi war criminals who had evaded the allied clutches immediately following the war - and it isn't easy. Based in Vienna, a city closely associated with Hitler, Wiesenthal's home is firebombed by neo-Nazis and his wife held hostage. However nothing would deter the man from his work which has only just finished with his death at 96, two years ago.
Produced by the Wiesenthal Centre's documentary unit, this film was put together for a memorial dinner held in Wiesenthal's honour last year. Even though it was produced by his supporters, the documentary doesn't completely brush over some of the controversies that sprung up around the man during his career; however you would have to do some serious soul searching, if at the end of it all, you found yourself questioning the man's integrity.
You could forgive Simon Wiesenthal for being a man driven purely by revenge and a hatred for Nazis, but this was not the case and as Wiesenthal himself explains, he aimed to bring enlightenment not revenge, and the hope that the world would never forget the millions that had died in the concentration camps throughout Europe.
