Die Sonnenblume. Von Schuld und Vergebung

A very interesting book. It begins with a story called, The Sunflower, that recounts an experience Wiesenthal had when he was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. One day when he was part of a detail working at a hospital, he was taken by one of the nurses to see a badly wounded, young SS

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officer who knew that he was dying and who wanted forgiveness from a Jew for the terrible things he had done, in particular one incident in which he participated in the murder of men, women and children who were herded into a small house that was set on fire and then those trying to escape or jump to safety were all shot. The officer explains his childhood (good Catholic household, but not quite conventional as his father was a strong Social Democrat who despised the Nazis, and basically cut himself off from his son when the latter joined the Hitler Youth and later the SS). The officer describes his qualms at what they were ordered to do, but does not deny doing it. Now, that he knows he is dying, he wants the forgiveness of a Jew for what he has done. Wiesenthal does not forgive; he leaves the room (this after several hours of discussion and even holding the man's hand at one point). The next day the same nurse tries to give Wiesenthal a small package of personal items that had belonged to the officer who died in the night. Wiesenthal wants nothing to do with them and suggests that they be sent to the officer's mother. Wiesenthal has a number of discussions with friends in the camp as to what he should have done, and the views are mixed. After the war, Wiesenthal travels to the hometown of the officer and finds his mother living in a bombed-out apartment. All she has left are the memories of her good son. Wiesenthal concocts a story of how the officer passed a message through a third party to him, and says nothing about the true nature of the son's involvement in the war, and certainly nothing about his death-bed request for forgiveness from a Jew.

At the end of the story, Wiesenthal notes that he kept silent when the SS officer asked for his forgiveness, and later he also kept silent rather than shatter the illusions of the mother as to the goodness of her son. He asks: was this silence right or wrong? This is the "profound moral question" that he puts to the reader, and as he says, the crux of the matter is the question of forgiveness: "Forgetting is something that time alone takes care of, but forgiveness is an act of volition, and only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision."

The rest of the book is composed of short pieces from 46 people on how their thoughts on whether Wiesenthal did the right thing. A very interesting collection that includes the spectrum from the Dalai Lama to Primo Levi to Albert Speer. It is hard to summarize such a disparate group, but there is considerable focus on the difference between forgiving and forgetting, and I think almost unanimous agreement that only those who have been sinned against have the moral right to offer forgiveness; hence, it was not possible for Wiesenthal to offer it to the dying man, because only those he killed had that right, and they, by definition, are in no position to do so. And even then, some would argue that there are crimes so terrible that they are beyond the pale of forgiveness.

I know some people who say they are "tired" of hearing about the Holocaust and won't read, watch stories about it; it is in the past, we all know about it, can't get interested in continuing to deal with it. Such people should read this book and think upon the vast moral questions that it poses. One respondent, Hubert Locke had an interesting view:

There is much that silence might each us, if we could but learn to listen to it. Not the least of its lessons is that there may well be questions for which there are no answers and other questions for which answers would remove the moral force of the question. There are matters that perhaps should always remain unanswered: questions which should lay like a great weight on our consciences so that we continually feel an obligation to confront their insistent urging. There are questions that are unanswerable queries of the soul, matters too awe-full for human response, too demonic for profound rational resolution. By our silence, perhaps we acknowledge as much; we own up to our own humanness. We concede that we are not gods and that we lack, as much as one might be loath to admit it, the capacity to provide understanding and assurance for every inexplicable moment in life.

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