In The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs, along with the anecdotal history of Hitler’s reign of terror, the “Nazi Hunter” recounted his own journey through more than a dozen concentration camps, from his native Poland to Austria, of those dark days during which he lost 89 members of his own and his wife’s family, emerging finally at the end of the war “like a skeleton with some skin over the bones”.

Recalling his first walk as a free man, a thirsty Wiesenthal had stopped by at a house for a sip of drink. An Austrian peasant woman brought him a glass of grape juice. “Was it bad over there?” she asked, pointing at the grey buildings across the fields. “Be glad you didn’t see the camp from the inside,” said Wiesenthal. “Why should I see it?” the woman said, “I am not a Jew.”

It angered him, this racism, or when people said they had “known nothing about these things,” or that they “had saved some Jews”.

Wiesenthal established a network of correspondents in various camps to interview former prisoners and take affidavits concerning brutal SS guards. His team had to trace over 100,000 survivors of the concentration camps, most of them living temporarily in 200 displaced-persons centres.

Ever since he set up the Documentation Center, hundreds of people provided tip-offs. They preferred to talk to him rather than the police because he never revealed his sources.

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His life became a veritable thriller without the thrills, for every moment was painful catharsis.

Dr Aribert Heim was a typical example of the cases the Center dealt with. He had used 540 inmates of a concentration camp as guinea pigs by amputating healthy prisoners, slitting their abdomen and leaving them to die. On one occasion he picked out two prisoners, killed them with a poisonous injection, decapitated the corpses, had the heads boiled and cleaned, and finally decorated his desk with one of the skulls; he presented the other one to a friend.

Wiesenthal followed up on the case right up until the late 1970s and saw to it that Heim’s source of income was cut off, but the doctor had disappeared. It was discovered only two decades later that he had died without meeting with justice in a court of law.

Despite setbacks such as these, and crucial files disappearing, he would not let them forget the lashings, the humiliation, the depravity. He wrote to world leaders, relentlessly chasing the criminals, sometimes for decades, and waited for “justice, not vengeance” to take its course. “What sense did it make when a Nazi who had killed thousands of people got two years in prison — 20 minutes for each murder? The important thing was to prevent the commission of mass murder in the future.”

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The first concentration camp of the Third Reich was opened in Dachau on March 22, 1933. Heinrich Himmler, the commissioner of police, had announced that “undeterred by paltry scruples” it was “in the best interests of our people”.

The camp was 990 feet wide and 1,980 feet long with a neutral zone that had a ditch and was surrounded by a canal and electrically-charged wires. It could accommodate no more than 5,000 prisoners but always had at least 12,000, with the numbers increasing to 30,000 in the last months.

Weakened and demoralised, they went through severe and humiliating forms of punishment, standing in severe weather for hours or tied to the stake. Those with gold fillings in their teeth were the prized prisoners. After they were killed by the nurses, their mouths were prised open and the gold shared.

The living conditions were appalling. Mattresses were full of lice and fleas. Some of the prisoners were so ill they could not get up to answer nature’s call.

No one knew how long they would live and death came ominously, and never as a relief. The distinguished among the prisoners were paraded naked to provide laughter for the officers who tired of their earlier entertainment of making plaster moulds of those with bodily defects.

When the doors were finally forced open in 1945, a clever cover-up job was done by the perpetrators of the crimes. Wiesenthal ruminated, “For many decades it was a lonely fight… surrounded by a curtain woven from two sides: by those could not forget even if they wanted to and by those who did not want to be reminded.”

He had his critics. Among them was Alfons Gorbach, the former Federal Chancellor of Austria, who complained that he was “opening old wounds.” For Wiesenthal, it was necessary. “Do you want your children and the children of your children to grow up and again become infected with theories of inferior races that must be exterminated like vermin? Don’t you want them to become immunised by learning the truth? I believe the young people in Germany and Austria deserve a chance to live without a sense of guilt.”

There was another side to the truth, too, and he quoted instances where the “victims were not always innocent either. I once talked with a Jewish concentration camp trusty who had saved his life by taking part in the execution of a fellow Jew. The devilish SS man told him it was either he or the other man. The trusty’s defence was that if he hadn’t done it, somebody else would”.

Moral scruples rarely have any agency when survival is on test. Starved in transit, vehicles arriving at the camps often had corpses with the flesh gnawed out. One record stated, “This was done not by animals but by famished comrades. Cannibalism in the year 1942 in Central Europe!”

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In the popular mindset and media portrayal, the present conflict’s skewed emphasis on Israel’s victims as opposed to Palestinians is to a large extent because of collective guilt. The Holocaust has raised controversial questions, mainly because it has held centrestage. On the other hand, there is barely any discussion about the ethnic cleansing of Germans by the Red Army, or the victims of Stalin’s Gulags or Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Jewish historian Alfred Lilienthal referred to it as “Holocaustomania”; Britain’s chief rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits, had described the Holocaust campaigns in the Jerusalem Post as “an entire industry, with handsome profits for writers, researchers, filmmakers, monument builders, museum planners and even politicians” where even some rabbis and theologians were “partners in this big business”. Paula Hyman of Columbia University observed: “The invocation of the suffering endured by the Jews under the Nazis often takes the place of rational argument, and is expected to convince doubters of the legitimacy of current Israeli government policy.”

There are exceptions. In 2016, as Israel pounded Gaza, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network released an open letter expressing alarm at “the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever pitch”. Of the 327 signatories, 40 had survived the Holocaust and the rest were families of the victims.

Nine years later, speaking about Palestinians, Israel’s Defence Minister said that Israel was fighting“human animals”. Questions are being asked: In less than a century, are the Jews of Israel mimicking the Nazis?

Wiesenthal who witnessed many post-war conflicts until his death in 2005 had stated, “I have spent my entire life remembering and reminding the world of the consequences of indifference and silence. And now I ask myself: can it be that all my efforts in over four decades of work have been in vain?… This drive towards evil together with a sense of impunity has led to veritable orgies of brutality that remind me of the occurrences in the Nazi concentration camps.”

In his later book, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, he mentioned a cemetery close to a camp he was imprisoned in from where he could see a sunflower placed on each grave. He feared he too might end up in an unmarked mass grave.

Simon Wiesenthal is buried in Israel. He wouldn’t know that today there is a competition for body counts and memes of torture have replaced memorials.

Farzana Versey is a Mumbai-based writer. She tweets at @farzana_versey