Like people I’ve written about in the past, either celebrities or innovators, Siggi Wilzig’s life is surprising, moving and has an unpredictable ending. In outline form, it tells a familiar story: a young Jewish refugee arrives in America with nothing and climbs to the top of the material mountain. In detail, it is a modern-day David and Goliath adventure. In the Biblical account, David was this little guy who takes a sling and five stones from a brook, comes before this pagan giant and shouts out, “This day I will strike you down, that all the earth may know there is a God in Israel.” Well, that was Siggi: five-foot-five-and-a-half inches short, a survivor of Hitler’s inferno, who takes on the giants of oil and banking, and builds a kingdom so that people will listen when he declares to the world that there is a God in Israel. There is this great painting of David and Goliath by nineteenth-century artist Osmar Schindler. That’s the image I have of Siggi.

What did distinguish him was becoming the only Holocaust survivor to commandeer the takeovers of an American oil company and a commercial bank — to say nothing of being the first person in history to sue the Federal Reserve. There was a volcanic drive behind those campaigns. He refused to remain silent when anyone, including the American government, perpetrated an injustice. He was also an extraordinarily eloquent speaker when it came to Holocaust memory. He had a razor-sharp mind, an uncanny facility for language and the intuitions of a fox. Did he acquire those qualities in Auschwitz? Maybe. They were certainly honed to a fine edge there. But like all of us, he was a flawed human being. The best biographies paint a realistic portrait of ordinary people who somehow become extraordinary. Siggi Wilzig was an extreme case of that.

Over and over again in talks and lectures, he said he was “writing” a book. Why? What was his purpose? I found three life goals that were most important to him: provide for his family, protect memory of the Holocaust, and care for the wellbeing of children. Everything he did was to achieve those three ends. But there was a moment when his father laying dying in his arms in Auschwitz, and I think his father’s last word were the theme of Siggi’s life: “Don’t be bitter, and stick to your principles.” To the end of his days, Siggi had nightmares. But he wasn’t bitter. There was a marble plaque on his office wall that said it all: FREE MEN WHO FORGET THEIR BITTER PAST DO NOT DESERVE A BRIGHT FUTURE. He urged people never to forget their bitter past, but he never encouraged anyone to dwell in it. And along with memory of the past came unshakeable faith. Despite every reason to abandon faith in God, he never did.

Siggi never wrote anything down. There was no “Wilzig archive” to work from. He never even wrote letters. So everything had to be pieced together from interviews and historical research. Siggi did give his testimony to Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation—in fact, his is the single longest testimony in the Shoah Foundation’s 50,000 hours of recordings. That, plus talks he gave to schools and community groups, add up to nearly 800 pages of transcripts. Those were critical, since they gave me his remembrances in his own words.