Simon WIESENTHAL

David Belgray reports that Wiesenthal is a cousin whose family name too is BILGORAJ. A number of biographies of Wiesenthal can be found on the web by the Wiesenthal Centre as well as other sites. Wiesenthal was born in Buczacz in December of 1908 and the family name is a derivative of Buchach. Simon and his wife Cyla Mueller lost 89 members of their family in the Holocaust. Recovering from his time in concentration camps, Wiesenthal began gathering and preparing evidence on Nazi atrocities for the War Crimes Section of the U.S.Army. In 1947 he and thirty volunteers opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria where he began the collection of an evidence dossier on Adolf Eichmann. Wiesenthal became the world famous Nazi hunter tracking down, among many others, the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank and the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor concentration camps. In November 1977 Wiesenthal founded the Simon Wiesenthal Center, today a 400,00 member international center for Holocaust remembrance and the defense of human rights. About ten years ago, when Wiesenthal was in New York for the promotion of his last book, SRRGer David Belgray called him, and Wiesenthal invited him to meet with him in his hotel room. David recalls: "He was friendly and engaging, with little time to spare. We must have spent about l5 minutes or so in his room. He remembered a Bilgoraj cousin who had a 'drugstore' either in Czortków or Kopychintsy."

This page is hosted at no cost to the public by JewishGen, Inc., a non-profit corporation. If you feel there is a benefit to you in accessing this site, your JewishGen-erosity is appreciated.

Jewish Gen Home Page

KehilaLinks Directory

Gesher Galicia