An interest in drawing, combined with knowledge of home building from his stepfather's brick factory, led him to study architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He also edited a satirical magazine that the authorities often confiscated -- a matter of pride to its young editor who figured its content was successful.
Decades later, he earned money by ghost-writing Polish political joke books at the expense of the Communist regime.
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Simon Wiesenthal Dies At 96
Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal, who helped track down Nazi war criminals following World War II, then spent the later decades of his life fighting anti-Semitism and prejudice against all people, died in Vienna, Austria on Sept. 20, 2005. He was 96.
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After college, Wiesenthal formed a small architectural practice in the Ukrainian city of Lvov. In 1936, he married Cyla Mueller, his girlfriend since high school.
Their few prosperous years ended with the dissolution of the Soviet-German "non-aggression" pact of 1939. Stalin let loose his security apparatus on the Ukraine. Forced from his livelihood, Wiesenthal worked as a mechanic in a bedspring factory and unsuccessfully tried to bribe security officials from taking away his family to certain death.
Wiesenthal himself was rounded up with other Jews and nearly killed by Ukrainian soldiers. Each man stood against a wall and beside a wooden crate that was meant to hold a corpse. An officer shot a man in the neck, swigged liquor and shot the next man. As the officer approached Wiesenthal, church bells sounded. "Enough!" the officer said. "Evening mass!"
"What I saw for the first time, was systematic extermination that had no motive except to kill every Jew, starting with the ones who looked the most dangerous to Hitler. And done by people who took real pleasure in killing us," he told his biographer Alan Levy.
Wiesenthal and his wife were forced to work in a labor camp that serviced the German railroad. He helped Cyla, a blonde who could pass as Polish, escape through the underground, but each thought the other died during the war.
He and Cyla found each other months after the German surrender by scanning lists of survivors. She remained, until her death in 2003, Wiesenthal's solid, if long-suffering, defender. Wiesenthal could never stop his work and once turned down her suggestion that they move to Israel and "be normal people."
Survivors include their daughter, Pauline, of Herzliya, Israel, and three grandchildren.
During the war, Wiesenthal grew to think survival was unlikely and twice attempted suicide instead of facing torture. He said the turning point was a conversation with an SS corporal one day toward the end of the war. The man bet Wiesenthal that no one would ever believe the truth of what had occurred in the concentration camps.
Their exchange, Wiesenthal later said, gave him the will to live through the war.
By May 1945, when Wiesenthal was freed by Allied soldiers at Mauthausen camp in Austria, his six-foot-tall body weighed 99 pounds. Gradually restored to health, he transferred to an Allied base in Lidz, Austria. He went to the war crimes office and offered his services after presenting an exhaustive list of crimes he had witnessed.
