Murderers Among Us: The Wiesenthal Memoirs.

WIESENTHAL, Simon; Joseph Wechsberg.

$100.00

Item Number: 147288

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967.

First edition of Simon Wiesenthal’s autobiography. Octavo, original half cloth, illustrated. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Edited by Joseph Wechsberg. Jacket design by Leonard Leoni. Jacket photo by Lester Krauss.

The Murderers Among Us is an inspiring book -- the stirring life of a man who pursued justice in the heyday of expediency. Simon Wiesenthal was lying in a ward full of corpses when Allied troops reached Mauthausen Concentration Camp. His wife was lost in the vast confusion of postwar Europe, the rest of his family victims of the gas chambers. His own loss and the horrors he had witnessed made Wiesenthal vow to spend the rest of his life bringing Nazi war criminals to justice. This extraordinary book is Wiesenthal's own story and a profile of him by Joseph Wechsberg, a well-known writer for The New Yorker. The portrait that emerges is of a compassionate man whose single-minded purpose brought him much sorrow and danger, and who was everything but the "obsessive avenger" or "ruthless hunter" he was often called. He brought almost 1000 notorious Nazis to trial, while helping many accused criminals defend themselves by producing evidence that they committed their alleged crimes under duress. Wiesenthal is best known for his discovery of Adolf Eichmann's South American hideout. In these memoirs, Wiesenthal describes for the first time that 16-year search -- the tireless sifting through every clue, rumor, and scrap of information that finally led to the capture of the man responsible for the death of thousands, as well as the long search for the SS officer who arrested Anne Frank, and the consequent embarrassment of Austrian officials when the man was discovered on the Vienna police force. It was made into the 1989 film directed by Brian Gibson and written by Abby Mann, Robin Vote and Ron Hutchinson. The film stars Ben Kingsley, Renée Soutendijk, Craig T. Nelson, Anton Lesser, Jack Shepherd and Paul Freeman.