Word of Simon Wiesenthal's death came from an unlikely but touching source for filmmaker Richard Trank.

One of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal's greatest fears was that people would deny the Holocaust ever happened. Click photo for larger image. Related review "I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal" Listen In: Hear filmmaker Richard Trank discussing his documentary about Simon Wiesenthal : On first meeting Simon Wiesenthal On how the film came about On Nicole Kidman's volunteering to narrate the film

He was finishing a project at a post-production facility in Los Angeles when a young worker shared the news in September 2005. "He was about 20 years old, a Latino from the East Side of L.A., and he proceeded to tell me how he had visited the museum with his high school class, which a lot of schools out here do."

But the young man had returned to the Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center two or three times on his own and researched the death-camp survivor who hunted Nazi criminals for the rest of his days.

"I just thought, if Simon had touched this kid -- who many people wouldn't think there would be any reason for a kid like him to have any connection at all to Simon Wiesenthal -- then we needed to make a film. I brought it up to Rabbi Hier, and he agreed."

Trank and Rabbi Marvin Hier, who shared an Academy Award for their 1997 documentary "The Long Way Home," set to work on a movie about Wiesenthal's life and legacy. It debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival in February and opens today at the Manor Theater.

Wiesenthal had long been a part of Trank's life. "I first heard about him when I was a teenager," the 52-year-old writer, director and producer said this week by phone from L.A.

"I was a kid living in Southern California. My father had lost most of his family in the Holocaust, my mother was an only child who grew up in South Africa. Her parents were actors who ended up in South Africa, and they had lost all of their relatives."

Trank's father had been packed off to Canada, to join an older brother and to send money home so the rest of the family could follow. That never happened.

His dad lost his mother, youngest brother, aunts, uncles and cousins. Another brother survived a series of camps, finally escaping with a cousin from a labor camp and miraculously making his way to Switzerland.

Around the time of Trank's bar mitzvah, someone gave him a copy of Wiesenthal's 1967 book, "The Murderers Among Us." He read it, amazed, "because here was somebody who was really doing something on behalf of my grandmother and my uncles who didn't survive and my family members who did survive."

He was a hero to Trank, who never imagined he would be hired by the institution that bears Wiesenthal's name and know the man himself.

"I was brought on to do a weekly news and public affairs radio program, when they still used to air things like that. And then I began interviewing survivors. They had gotten a grant to do oral histories on video with some very early-generation video equipment," recalls Trank, who later moved into making films.

"I was very much in awe of him, and I was very nervous when I met him. ... This was 1981, he was in Los Angeles doing a tour for a new book that he'd written and the publisher forgot to provide a driver. They blew it somehow, and so I was asked to drive him around for a couple of days."

Trank found Wiesenthal to be an affable, curious man who loved to tell stories. He asked lots of questions about Trank's radio program and asked for copies (which the filmmaker found years later, stored in Wiesenthal's office in Vienna). "What surprised me was how approachable he was and, in many ways, how down to earth he was."

Trank had been collecting archival material for years and when it came time to make the film, he drew on a number of key interviews, including one from the early 1990s, in which Wiesenthal recounted his childhood, World War II and liberation from Mauthausen in 1945, another done around his 90th birthday with the Shoah Foundation and the first interview ever given by Simon and Cyla Wiesenthal's daughter, Pauline.

"She wasn't eager to go on camera. She's a very private person. In that way, she's like her mother," Trank said.

"I didn't know her well. I'd met her a couple of times over the years and I was coming with my crew to Israel last summer to film the unveiling of the headstones where Simon and Cyla are buried," and Pauline and her husband hosted a dinner for out-of-town guests. That night, she consented to an interview.

"I think, initially when we sat down, she was nervous about it, because she's never done this, but she opened up ... and added another dimension to the film," sharing photos of her parents cradling her as an infant. "It's just kind of a beautiful moment," a rare insight into Wiesenthal as husband and father.

Although Trank interviewed colleagues and office staffers about rumors (ultimately untrue) that Wiesenthal would win or share the Nobel Prize with Elie Wiesel, he chose not to use that in the film. "Everyone in the office was very upset, and he wasn't. He just said, 'We have a lot of work to do, and I don't want people being upset about this, and let's just go on.' "

One of Wiesenthal's biggest fears was that people would deny the Holocaust ever happened.

"So prosecuting these criminals was creating a historical record so nobody could ever say that. At the same time, it was laying the groundwork so that it never happened to anybody else. ... He was troubled by the fact that other genocides had occurred or were occurring after the Holocaust, in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia."

Trank runs Moriah Films, the documentary film production unit of the Wiesenthal center, and he is starting work on a new film about the Jewish refugee crisis just before and during the Holocaust.

Yes, he occasionally documents sweeter stories. Take his 2005 documentary "Beautiful Music," about an Orthodox Jewish music teacher and her blind and autistic Palestinian student.

"That was a happier movie," he concedes. "But working on this film about Simon was unbelievably gratifying for me, and even though you're dealing with some dark things in it, his example is such a positive example that this one didn't keep me up at night. The one I'm working on now, we'll see."