The sound of sirens roaring down the main street outside my company made me wonder: Why do we call them sirens? Sirens, in Greek legend, drew you towards danger. We’re supposed to avoid the oncoming sirens.

Shouldn’t we call them “alarms”?

Okay, maybe they need to give me more work to do around here.

Links to more obituaries and statements:

Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs

The Los Angeles Times

Ynet

The Jerusalem Post: Obituary, reader euologies, and biography, more.

CNN:

With more than six million Jews killed during the Holocaust, including 89 members of his own family, Wiesenthal felt driven to track down those involved in the atrocities.

The Washington Post

The New York Times is going with the AP obit; I can only assume theirs didn’t make the deadline.

The New York times obit in full.

From the Times obituary:

He was often asked why he had become a searcher of Nazi criminals instead of resuming a profitable career in architecture. He gave one questioner this response: “You’re a religious man. You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, ‘What have you done?’ there will be many answers. You will say, ‘I became a jeweler.’ Another will say, ‘I smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.’ Still another will say, ‘I built houses,’ but I will say, ‘I didn’t forget you.’ ”

AFP, via Forbes.

The BBC, with reader comments.

Add more links in the comments, or trackback new ones of your own.

Below is the entire text of Reuters‘ acknowledgment of Simon Wiesenthal’s life.

VIENNA (Reuters) - Simon Wiesenthal, the veteran Nazi hunter who helped bring over 1,100 Nazi war criminals to trial, has died in Vienna at the age of 96, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said on Tuesday.

Wiesenthal died in his sleep, Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, told Reuters by phone.

Wiesenthal, born in 1908 in what is now Ukraine, helped to catch major figures such as Adolf Eichmann, one of Hitler’s chief henchmen in the campaign to exterminate Jews, and Franz Stangl, ex-commandant of the Treblinka death camp.

“Simon Wiesenthal was the conscience of the Holocaust,” Hier said in a statement on the center’s Web site.

“He became the permanent representative of the victims, determined to bring the perpetrators of the history’s greatest crime to justice,” he added.

Now, it may be that they just haven’t put the full obituary online yet. I may be seeing bias where there is none.

Or perhaps they simply do not like the Jews.

Simon Wiesenthal, the man responsible for finding Adolph Eichmann so he could be brought to justice, passed away last night in his sleep. I am not very clear on the afterlife, but I am clear on one thing: God Himself will honor Weisenthal. He is one of the people who would not let the world forget, and would not let the Nazis sleep easily after murdering the six million.

Wiesenthal, who helped find one-time SS leader Adolf Eichmann and the policeman who arrested Anne Frank, died in his sleep at his home in Vienna, said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

“I think he’ll be remembered as the conscience of the Holocaust. In a way he became the permanent representative of the victims of the Holocaust, determined to bring the perpetrators of the greatest crime to justice,” Hier told The Associated Press.

A survivor of five Nazi death camps, Wiesenthal changed his life’s mission after the war, dedicating himself to tracking down Nazi war criminals and to being a voice for the 6 million Jews who died during the onslaught. He himself lost 89 relatives in the Holocaust.

It is simply inconceivable to me that you can “lose” 89 relatives. That sentence should read “Eighty-nine of Weisenthal’s relatives were murdered by the Nazis.”

“When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it,” he once said.

[...]Even after turning 90, Wiesenthal continued to remind and to warn. While appalled at atrocities committed by Serbs against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in the 1990s, he said no one should confuse the tragedy there with the Holocaust.

“We are living in a time of the trivialization of the word ‘Holocaust,’” he told AP in 1999. “What happened to the Jews cannot be compared with all the other crimes. Every Jew had a death sentence without a date.”

And that school of thought survives in the world today.

Simon Wiesenthal’s name will be remembered long after the names of the Nazis are erased from memory.