The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness by Simon Wiesenthal
But haven't the Germans repented? you might ask. What about the millions of dollars of reparations that have been given to individuals and to the State of Israel?
Unlike South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Germany never established a public forum at which crimes against the Jews were openly confessed. On the contrary, de-Nazification was imposed by the allies on Germans who by and large concealed or minimized their crimes. Many of those who created the Third Reich remained in positions of power after the war simply by denying their Nazi involvement, and their denials were accepted by a community that conspired with them to cover up and condone rather than repent. Even as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer publicly declared Germany's readiness to pay reparations, his secretary of state was Hans Globke, the author of the emergency legislation that gave Hitler unlimited dictatorial powers and of the Nuremburg Laws that disenfranchised the German Jews. But because Globke was never a member of the Nazi party, he was free to serve in the government—even one led by the impeccably anti-Nazi Adenauer.
And the Nazis’ destruction of European Jewry was not their only crime against humanity. Or even against Germany itself. Historians have shown us that Nazi Germany was not simply an iron cage in which German citizens were forced to abide by Hitler's orders on pain of death, but was instead a cooperative society, with its citizens often eager participants in its crimes. Götz Aly has revealed that some “Aryan” German families handed over their elderly grandparents or unruly children to be put to death in the euthanasia program. The outcome was both murder and a kind of national suicide, soiling Germany, perhaps forever. How could this ever be atoned for?
My father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, wrote that “the blood of the innocent cries forever.” Should that blood cease to cry, humanity would cease to be. Perhaps the issue is not forgiveness, but rather how the victims and their descendants can live without bitterness or vengeance, without losing their own humanity, when they hear the cry of the blood of their families. Rather than asking for forgiveness, the descendants of the Nazis should continue to hear the cries of Jewish blood, and thereby preserve their own humanity.
JOSÉ HOBDAY
The question, “What would I have done?” seems to imply that my response might be a judgment on Mr. Wiesenthal's action. I make no such judgment. Altruism, mental gymnastics, conundrums, theologizing, and debates could swirl around this question. To me, these are not integral.
For some, forgiveness is weakness and may actually be a condoning of the evil done. I do not agree. In the air is also the question, “Does Karl even have the right to ask forgiveness?” That is beside the point, because he does ask. Mr. Wiesenthal tells us that he stays with the dying man, listens to his story, but does not want to give comfort to him. Mr. Wiesenthal leaves in silence, a silence that will have a different meaning for each man.
I am of Native American descent (Seneca, Iroquois, and Seminole) and have felt discrimination all my life on this land. I have listened to the stories and read of the atrocities, executions, starvation, and genocide committed against my people. History gives us many accounts of these afflictions. Native people have been wiped out by government gifts of smallpox blankets; we have had dogs set upon us and have been shot down for sport—many more than six million of us. This too has been going on for centuries, while the invaders/conquerors have stood by and watched. Many others around the world have suffered terrible indignities as well.
But the words of my Seneca mother to me when I was badly wronged and wanted revenge and retaliation stay with me: “Do not be so ignorant and stupid and inhuman as they are. Go to an elder and ask for the medicine that will turn your heart from bitterness to sweetness. You must learn the wisdom of how to let go of poison.”
Forgetting and forgiveness may seem to be two different things, but I believe they are of a piece. Every time you remember a wrong, you are asked to forgive it. From my experience, wrongs will return to the mind for years and years and years. Each recall asks for forgiveness, and you stay in the power of that act until you let go. Compassion is all-embracing, extending to all creation—to plants and to animals, including the two-legged variety. Forgiveness is of the heart. I would have forgiven, as much for my own peace as for Karl's. Mr. Wiesenthal has gained the sure knowledge that he should follow the path of doing good and seeking justice. My hope is that he finds peace and harmony in his heart, and if the memory is still a burden to him, that it be wiped away. No one, no memory, should have the power to hold us down, to deny us peace. Forgiving is the real power. I offer him the sturdy sunflower of our great West—it is small enough to dance. Ho!
CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS
The Sunflower, whether wholly autobiographical or in parts fictional, is an intensely moving and vivid book. Were it my task to write a literary criticism of it, I should be loud in its praise. But the request that has been made of me is to give an opinion on one definite point. Did the author do right in refusing a word of compassion to the dying SS man who had made to him the confession of the atrocious murder of a Jewish child?
The author does not admit of any repentance for his refusal. But his two Jewish friends, now dead, thought that he would have done very wrong to have admitted such compassion. Only the Polish seminarist thought otherwise and he has vanished from the author's life so that he is no longer able to keep in touch with the developments of his thought. But it is clear from the author's visit to the SS man's mother that his mind is not at ease. It is indeed not clear what purpose that visit had or what purpose he could have supposed that it would have had, since he was not willing to tell the mother the truth about her son, but the fact that he made it is proof of a disturbed, uncertain, and restless mind.
I am asked what, absolutely, he ought to have done under these circumstances. Let me first make it clear that that is quite a different question from the question “what would I have done?” To that second question I can make no answer. I claim no capacity to resist temptation above the average and what fortitude I would have been able to show in face of horrors so incomparably greater than any that I have ever been called on to face I cannot say. We can all say that men ought to be martyrs if challenged on their faith. We can none of us say whether in the day of trial we ourselves would have the hardihood to be martyrs.
But on the absolute challenge what the author should have done I have no doubt that he should have said a word of compassion. The theology of the matter is surely clear and, as the Polish seminarist truly says in this book, there is no difference on it between Christians and Jews. Differences are here irrelevant. The law of God is the law of love. We are created in order to love one another, and, when the law of love is broken, God's nature is frustrated. Such bonds when broken should be reforged as soon as possible. We are under obligation to forgive our neighbor even though he has offended against us seventy times seven.
On the other hand we are all born in original sin. (Jewish orthodoxy, I understand, does not admit that exact phrase but the language in which they repudiate it shows very effectively that they do in fact believe in it as much as any Christians.) Indeed one could not well do otherwise, for original sin, unlike the other Christian doctrines, is a definite necessity of thought. Men are born in sin and when God has been defied by actual sin there cannot be forgiveness unless there is repentance. We are indeed told to be reluctant to condemn others. “Judge not that ye be not judged.” It is our duty to reflect how small is our own understanding and that, if we knew all of a story, we should often see how much more there was to be said for another's action, how much more—it may be—of the blame really is ours than appeared at first sight.
But these considerations, so often just, are here irrelevant. Here the SS man had committed an appalling crime. It was perhaps relevant for him to recount the impulses that had caused him to join the SS, the appalling corruption of Nazi propaganda to which he had been subjected, the military discipline of which he was the slave at the time of the act, but these are explanations. They are n
It is of course true that penitence involves a willingness to make restitution to the person wronged and, had the circumstances been other, it would have been reasonable to have demanded of the SS man that, even if he could not bring back to life the little child whom he had killed or discover any of his immediate relatives, yet he should in some notable way have attempted some service to the Jews which would have given evidence of the sincerity of his repentance. Whether he could or would have satisfied such a challenge had he lived and been restored to health, who shall say? Since he was to die in a few hours, the question is meaningless. Even if the author had doubted, one should give the benefit of the doubt.
'Tis God shall repay. I am safer so.
Nor indeed is it easy to see, as indeed the author himself confesses, for what reason the SS man should have sent for and made this confession to a Jew unless he was sincerely ashamed of what he had done.
Of course I am stating what seems to me to be the absolute moral law. I am not suggesting that obedience to that law could under the circumstances possibly have been easy or passing any personal condemnation. But surely the absolute moral law was stated by Christ at the Crucifixion when He prayed for the forgiveness of His own murderers. It is of course true that the persecution and murder of Jews was still going on and that the author fully expected that he himself would be murdered before long. But that, I should have thought, in the moral order made forgiveness easier rather than more difficult.
The author's two Jewish friends, Arthur and Josek, argued with him that maybe he had a right to forgive injuries against himself but that he had no right to forgive injuries against other people. But insofar as this act was not merely a personal act of one SS man against one Jewish child but an incident in a general campaign of genocide, the author was as much a victim—or likely to be soon a victim—of that campaign as was the child, and, being a sufferer, had therefore the right to forgive. His forgiveness could not in the nature of things be the casual, idle word of someone who pardoned without caring the perpetrator of a distant crime to which he was really indifferent.
Nor of course has forgiveness anything to do with the refusal to punish. In this case since the SS man was just about to die the question of punishment did not arise, but, had he survived, the fact that he had been spiritually forgiven would of course have been no reason why he should not have been subjected to the appropriate punishment.
It is interesting to understand why the SS man wanted thus to confess to an unknown Jew. The SS man had been brought up as a Catholic but he had abandoned his religion when he joined the Hitler Youth. There seems some suspicion that on his deathbed he had a certain return of faith—or at least a desire to return to his faith. If that was at all so, if he had come to think that there was at least a possibility of future life and a judgment awaiting him, then it would of course have been reasonable that he should have confessed to a priest had one been available. If there were no priest he could be confident that the verdicts of God would be just and, if his repentance was sincere, need be under no fear that God would not show mercy.
Whichever way round, why was his state made any better, his mind at all relieved, by confessing to an unknown Jew? The Jew had no power to give him absolution. It is not easy to see but it is a psychological fact that sinners on their deathbed do often wish to relieve themselves by telling their story to someone and under any normal circumstances who would be so hard-hearted as to refuse to listen to such a story?
The real issue is whether the Jew and Nazi were two of God's children sharing a common humanity or whether they are two different sorts of being, irrevocably at war with one another. If the second interpretation was that accepted by the Jews it was assuredly the Nazis who were responsible for it and they could not complain if the Jews accepted it. Yet for all that, whatever the temptation to think otherwise, it is surely the inevitable consequence of any monotheistic faith that all men—even the least naturally lovable—are the children of God, in Christian belief that they are those for whom their Omnipotent Creator did not disdain to die, in Jewish belief that they are God's creatures.
One can well understand how the Jews in their camps had come to tell one another in the bitter sick joke which the author recounts to us that God was on leave. Yet it was precisely the rejection of this blasphemy that surely religious faith demanded—demanded the belief that somehow, however difficult it might be to see how, “God is not mocked” and that, as with Job, “though He slay me yet will I trust in him.”
Man, what is this and why art thou despairing?
God shall forgive thee all but thy despair.
According to an old medieval legend the Apostles assembled together in heaven to recelebrate the Last Supper. There was one place vacant, until through the door Judas came in and Christ rose and kissed him and said, “We have waited for thee.”
RODGER KAMENETZ
Dear Simon Wiesenthal,
I feel silence, under the circumstances, was the best response. As a captive marked for death, you did not have the full freedom to speak. Either to forgive or to condemn, or both as the situation required. For this person, even by the manner he was treating you in that hospital, needed to hear your criticism before the conversation could ever move to forgiveness. Yet how could you know how your words would be taken, or what their consequences would be to your survival? You were under duress—the best choice was to remain silent.
That leads to my main objection to the situation: you were not addressed as a person. You were addressed, from his perspective, as Jew. Not as a Jew, a Jewish person, as an individual, with a life, a history, a heartbreak of your own, but merely as Jew. For his purposes, any Jew would do.
That did not give you proper respect. And in your condition at that time, respect was also precious. I cannot encounter another person's humanity as a category, but only when I meet him or her as a particular individual. That was the insult hidden within his approach. Yes, he saw the suffering he had inflicted, and he felt the guilt. But he had not moved past the deeper sickness of his soul and of his time—and our time as well. He could not see you as a person because he could only see you as Jew.
You yourself saw him as a particular person, a human being. That is to your credit. If he had also reached the same point, then the conversation about forgiveness could begin.
CARDINAL FRANZ KÖNIG
Archbishop of Vienna
Reading about your experiences moved me very deeply. Your story is shocking, and not only because of the horrors you had to witness as a concentration camp prisoner. I found just as shocking your account of your student days and previous life at the university. The recurring symbol of the sunflower in your narrative, on the one hand, shows literary brilliance; on the other hand, it begs for a psychological interpretation which I would not attempt.
As for the difficult question you finally address to the reader—whether you behaved correctly toward the dying young SS man who “confessed” to you his participation in a horrible murder of Jews and asked you for forgiveness by proxy, as it were—I do not want to get into the general questions it raises concerning justice, mercy, sin, etc. However, I would like to answer your personal question as follows:
Even though an individual cannot forgive what was done to others, because he is not competent to do that, there is still a question of whether one may forgive. For Christians, the binding answer is in the Gospels. The question of whether there is a limit to forgiveness has been emphatically answered by Christ in the negative.
The distinction between whether we can forgive and whether we may forgive still leaves unresolved the question of wh
Considering your situation at the time and recalling what you went through, an explicit pardon would have surpassed our concept of the human. Nevertheless, you had an opportunity to put forward an act of almost superhuman goodness in the midst of a subhuman and bestial world of atrocities. The fact that you did not take advantage of this opportunity may be what still haunts you as a striving human being.
Summing up, let me conclude my reply with the words of the Psalm: “If thou, O LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O LORD, who shall stand?” (130:3). Thank you so much for your confidence in entrusting this manuscript to me.
HAROLD S. KUSHNER
I am not sure there is such a thing as forgiving another person, though I know there is such a thing as being forgiven. To be forgiven is to feel the weight of the past lifted from our shoulders, to feel the stain of past wrongdoing washed away. To be forgiven is to feel free to step into the future unburdened by the precedent of who we have been and what we have done in previous times.
My imagination, contaminated by computer imagery, sees the human soul as possessing a “feedback mechanism.” Every time we are called on to make a decision, we not only weigh the alternatives, we deal with the memories of how we have responded to similar situations in the past. A voice inside our head tells us “these are the choices, and this is the way you have chosen on other occasions.” Thus Maimonides and Erich Fromm see that every time the Pharaoh of the Exodus story says no to Moses, he makes it more likely that he will say no the next time and harder for him to change course and say yes, because his feedback mechanism keeps telling him “you are a person who says no to such demands.”