Sir Ben Kingsley: I was filming, um, a frightfully bad film in Vienna, and I went back to my
trailer and on the table was a black and white photograph of a really distinguished looking
guy. And I said to my assistant at the time, who was called Brookie, I said, "Brookie,
this photograph has been placed on my trailer and on the back of it, it says, 'You must
meet this man.'" And I was filming in Vienna. And Brook said, "That's Simon Wiesenthal."
And that was a year before I met him. I still to this day do not know how that photograph
arrived in my trailer, but there it was.
Oh, I had occasion to meet Simon, and that was extraordinary. Because I met him in Vienna
and I went to his office in Vienna, where he, where he waved at the documents on the
walls of his archives and said, "This is blood turned to ink." And I never forgot that--how
succinctly and poetically, and shockingly, he said, "This is, we have ink now--statistics,
and this is blood turned to ink." And he probably waved his hand across a million lives in one
gesture, looking at one shelf.
There are gestures that do, that come directly from Simon and I incorporated them into my
performance. When I, when I met Simon, and I loved him, when I met Simon in Vienna, as
Arnold so eloquently said, he would be wracked with... I would almost call it survivor's
guilt, but he was such a brilliant man I think he transcended that. But whenever he used
the phrase, "I survived," very often he would have to pause and, and he did weep, and he
had a particular gesture of drawing his hand across his face as he wept, which was something
that I found so beautiful, and so articulate, that I dared to incorporate it into my, into
my own performance. There were other gestures of his too, wonderful hand gestures and arm
gestures to try and, with his body language, and he was a magnificent man, with his body
language try and make the incomprehensible comprehensible. He was a conduit, he was a
shaman, he was a storyteller, and he lived to tell the story.
Something was handed on to me that became absolutely indelible. It was in his gift and
he handed it over to me. He even watched the, the opening scenes of "Murders Amongst Us,"
when Mauthausen is liberated and I stagger out of the camp holding his drawings, that
Simon had done as an architect. He drew these atrocities as a witness. And in my performance
they blur out of my hand and I collapse, and this wonderful Major Harcourt, who liberated
the camp, takes me in his arms and we have this exchange between us. And the director
says, 'Cut.' And I look across the courtyard and there's Simon watching the scene like
this. Watching me. Most extraordinary exchange of energies that went on between, between
him and I, so I was very aware of the privilege of passing on his witness to the camera, and
to the audience, eventually�