Simon Wiesenthal is a witness. He has spent more than half of his life ensuring that the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust will not be forgotten and that its perpetrators would be punished. A survivor of World War II and the concentration camps, Wiesenthal determined once he was freed to commit his life to the cause of justice. "Survival is a privilege which entails obligations," he wrote in his 1989 book, Justice Not Vengeance. "I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived. The answer I have found for myself (and which need not necessarily be the answer for every survivor) is: I want to be their mouthpiece, I want to keep their memory alive, to make sure the dead live on in that memory."

In both books and deeds, Wiesenthal has kept those memories alive. Working through the Jewish Documentation Center in...