This is damn interesting.

On a January day in 1964, something remarkable happened.

Simon Wisenthall took the afternoon off.

He parked himself at a table on the terrace of Tel Aviv's Café Roval,

soaking up the sunshine as if he wished to bottle it. The friend he'd come to meet was late,

but Wisenthal had no reason to complain. He was still lounging with his drink and his reading

when the loudspeaker crackled to light over the murmur of cafe chatter. There was a phone call

for Mr. Wisenthal, the disembodied voice announced. When he rose to take the call, it was the

friend he had to cancel, many of Wisenthal's fellow cafe goers stood up to. Then they broke into

applause. A spontaneous standing ovation might have startled the average person, but it wasn't the first time crowds of strangers had risen to their feet in Simon Wisenthal's presence.

Though when this happened back home in Vienna, it had sometimes been to spit at him.

Neither the love nor the hate phased the 56-year-old, though. Certain occupational hazards

were to be expected when you were one of the world's pre-eminent Nazi hunters. Wisenthal

returned to his table to collect his things. When he got there, he found it occupied by three

women, who, he presumed, had pounced on the prime location.

But the women weren't there for his spot. They were there for him.

We must apologize for simply sitting down at your table, the first woman told him in Polish.

But when we heard your name on the loudspeaker, we wanted to talk to you.

All three of us were at Maidainik, so we thought we should ask you,

you must know what happened to Kobola. So much for his day off. Mydenik had been a concentration

camp, also known as Lublin, and questions like these had recently become the soundtrack of Wysenthal's

life. After years of working under the radar,

...