Survivors Of The Shoah Visual History Foundation

Cultures create myths and fables because they need them; thus was born the real-life fable of Anne Frank. A Jewish girl who kept a diary during the two years her family spent hiding in an Amsterdam attic before her death in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, Frank fulfilled a complex collective need when her diary was published in 1947.

Eugene Zinn was about an hour into a PBS Holocaust documentary in January when he heard a familiar voice speaking his native Slovak tongue. Eighty years old with his eyesight nearly gone, Zinn pressed his face closer to the television screen in his West Hills den. There, clad in an argyle sweater and walking around the restored Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, was Otto Pressburger, a man for whom Zinn had been searching for much of his life. Zinn knew he needed to find Pressburger.

Simon Wiesenthal, who survived a dozen concentration camps, then spent his life bringing Nazi war criminals to justice and searing the Holocaust into the conscience of the world, died Tuesday. He was 96. Wiesenthal died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Vienna, said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. He had been in declining health since the death of his wife, Cyla, in November 2003.