In a helpless, despairing gesture she folded her hands together.
“So I am left all alone. I live only for the memories of my husband and my son. I might move to my sister's, but I don't want to give up this house. My parents lived here and my son was born here. Everything reminds me of the happy times, and if I went away I feel I should be denying the past.”
As my eyes came to rest on a crucifix which hung on the wall, the old lady noticed my glance.
“I found that cross in the ruins of a house. It was buried in the rubble, except that one arm was showing, pointing up accusingly to the sky. As nobody seemed to want it I took it away. I feel a little less abandoned.”
Had this woman too perhaps thought God was on leave and had returned to the world only when He saw all the ruins? Before I could pursue this train of thought, she went on: “What happened to us was a punishment from God. My husband said at the time of Hitler's coming to power that it would end in disaster. Those were prophetic words: I am always thinking about them…
“One day our boy surprised us with the news that he had joined the Hitler Youth, although I had brought him up on strictly religious lines. You may have noticed the saints’ pictures in the room. Most of them I had to take down after 1933—my son asked me to do so. His comrades used to rag him for being crazy about the Church. He told me about it reproachfully as if it were my fault. You know how in those days they set our children against God and their parents. My husband was not a very religious man. He rarely went to church because he did not like the priests, but he would allow nothing to be said against our parish priest, for Karl was his favorite. It always made my husband happy to hear the priest's praise…”
The old lady's eyes filled with tears. She took the photograph in her hand and gazed at it. Her tears fell on the glass…
I once saw in a gallery an old painting of a mother holding a picture of her missing son. Here, it had come to life.
“Ah,” she sighed, “if you only knew what a fine young fellow our son was. He was always ready to help without being asked. At school he was really a model pupil—till he joined the Hitler Youth, and that completely altered him. From then on he refused to go to church.”
She was silent for a while as she recalled the past. “The result was a sort of split in the family. My husband did not talk much, as was his habit, but I could feel how upset he was. For instance, if he wanted to talk about somebody who had been arrested by the Gestapo, he first looked round to be sure that his own son was not listening…I stood helplessly between my man and my child.”
Again she sank into a reverie. “Then the war began and my son came home with the news that he had volunteered. For the SS, of course. My husband was horrified. He did not reproach Karl—but he practically stopped talking to him…right up to the day of his departure. Karl went to war without a single word from his father.
“During his training he sent us snapshots but my husband always pushed the photos aside. He did not want to look at his son in SS uniform. Once I told him, ‘We have to live with Hitler, like millions of others. You know what the neighbors think of us. You will have difficulties at the factory.’
“He only answered: ‘I simply can't pretend. They have even taken our son away from us.’ He said the same thing when Karl left us. He seemed to have written Karl off as his son.”
I listened intently to the woman and I nodded occasionally, to encourage her to continue. She could not tell me enough.
I had previously talked to many Germans and Austrians, and learned from them how National Socialism had affected them. Most said they had been against it, but were frightened of their neighbors. And their neighbors had likewise been frightened of them. When one added together all these fears, the result was a frightful accumulation of mistrust.
There were many people like Karl's parents, but what about the people who did not need to knuckle under because they had readily accepted the new regime? National Socialism was for them the fulfillment of their dearest wishes. It lifted them out of their insignificance. That it should come to power at the expense of innocent victims did not worry them. They were in the winners’ camp and they severed relations with the losers. They expressed the contempt of the strong for the weak, the superman's scorn for the subhuman.
I looked at the old lady who was clearly kindhearted, a good mother and a good wife. Without doubt she must often have shown sympathy for the oppressed, but the happiness of her own family was of paramount importance to her. There were millions of such families anxious only for peace and quiet in their own little nests. These were the mounting blocks by which the criminals climbed to power and kept it.
Should I now tell the old lady the naked truth? Should I tell her what her “good” boy had done in the name of his leaders?
What link was there between me, who might have been among her son's victims, and her, a lonely woman grieving for the ruin of her family amid the ruins of her people?
I saw her grief and I knew my own grief. Was sorrow our common link? Was it possible for grief to be an affinity?
I did not know the answers to these questionings.
Suddenly the woman resumed her recollections.
“One day they fetched the Jews away. Among them was our family doctor. According to the propaganda, the Jews were to be resettled. It was said that Hitler was giving them a whole province in which they could live undisturbed among their own people. But later I heard of the brutality with which the SS treated them. My son was in Poland at the time and people talked of the awful things that were happening there. One day my husband said: ‘Karl is with the SS over there. Perhaps the positions are reversed and he is now treating our doctor, who formerly treated him—’
“My husband would not say what he meant by that. But I knew he was upset. I was very depressed.”
Suddenly the old lady looked at me intently.
“You are not a German?” she ventured.
“No,” I replied. “I am a Jew.”
She became a little embarrassed. At that time all Germans were embarrassed when they met Jews.
She hastened to tell me:
“In this district we always lived with the Jews in a very peaceful fashion. We are not responsible for their fate.”
“Yes,” said I, “that is what they all say now. And I can well believe it of you, but there are others from whom I won't take it. The question of Germany's guilt may never be settled. But one thing is certain: no German can shrug off the responsibility. Even if he has no personal guilt, he must share the shame of it. As a member of a guilty nation he cannot simply walk away like a passenger leaving a tramcar, whenever he chooses. It is the duty of Germans to find out who was guilty. And the non-guilty must dissociate themselves publicly from the guilty.”
I felt I had spoken sharply. The lonely widow looked at me sadly. She was not the person with whom one could debate about the sins and the guilt of the Germans.
This broken woman, so deeply immersed in grief, was no recipient for my reproaches. I was sorry for her. Perhaps I should not have raised the issue of guilt.
“I can't really believe the stories that they tell,” she went on. “I can't believe what they say happened to the Jews. During the war there were so many different stories. My husband was the only person who seemed to have known the truth. Some of his workmen had been out east setting up machinery, and when they came back they told of things even my husband would not believe, although he knew that the Party was capable of anything. He did not tell me much of what he had heard. Probably he was afraid I might gossip unthinkingly, and then we get into trouble with the Gestapo, who were already ill-disposed toward us and kept a watchful eye on my husband. But as our Karl was with the SS they did not molest us. Some of our friends and acquaintances got into trouble—they had been denounced by their best friends.
“My husband told me once that a Gestapo official had been to see him at the works, where foreigners were employed. He was inquiring into a case of sabotage. H
e talked to my husband for a long time, and finally said, ‘You are above suspicion, for your son is with the SS.’
“When Father came home and told me what had happened, he said bitterly: ‘They have turned the world upside down. The one thing that has hurt me more than anything else in my life is now my protection.’ He simply could not understand it.”
I gazed at the lonely woman sitting sadly with her memories. I formed a picture of how she lived. I knew that from time to time she would take in her arms her son's bundle, his last present, as if it were her son himself.
“I can well believe what people said—so many dreadful things happened. But one thing is certain, Karl never did any wrong. He was always a decent young man. I miss him so much now that my husband is dead…” I thought of the many mothers who were also bereft of their sons.
But her son had not lied to me; his home was just as he had described it. Yet the solution of my problem was not a single step nearer…
I took my leave without diminishing in any way the poor woman's last surviving consolation—faith in the goodness of her son.
Perhaps it was a mistake not to have told her the truth. Perhaps her tears might help to wash away some of the misery of the world.
That was not the only thought that occurred to me. I knew there was little I could say to this mother, and whatever I might have told her about her son's crime she would not have believed.
She would prefer to think me a slanderer than acknowledge Karl's crime.
She kept repeating the words “He was such a good boy,” as if she wished me to confirm it. But that I could not do. Would she still have the same opinion of him if she knew all?
In his boyhood Karl had certainly been a “good boy.” But a graceless period of his life had turned him into a murderer.
My picture of Karl was almost complete. His physical likeness was now established, for in his mother's home I had at last seen his face.
I knew all about his childhood and I knew all about the crime he had committed. And was pleased with myself for not having told his mother of his wicked deed. I convinced myself that I had acted rightly. In her present circumstances, to take from her her last possession would probably have also been a crime.
Today, I sometimes think of the young SS man. Every time I enter a hospital, every time I see a nurse, or a man with his head bandaged, I recall him.
Or when I see a sunflower…
And I reflect that people like him are still being born, people who can be indoctrinated with evil. Mankind is ostensibly striving to avert catastrophes; medical progress gives us hope that one day disease can be conquered, but will we ever be able to prevent the creation of mass murderers?
The work in which I am engaged brings me into contact with many known murderers. I hunt them out, I hear witnesses, I give evidence in courts—and I see how murderers behave when accused.
At the trial of Nazis in Stuttgart only one of the accused showed remorse. He actually confessed to deeds of which there were not witnesses. All the others bitterly disputed the truth. Many of them regretted only one thing—that witnesses had survived to tell the truth.
I have often tried to imagine how that young SS man would have behaved if he had been put on trial twenty-five years later.
Would he have spoken in court as he did to me before he died in the Dean's room? Would he openly admit what he had confessed to me on his deathbed?
Perhaps the picture that I had formed of him in my mind was kinder than the reality. I never saw him in the camp with a whip in his hand, I saw him only on his deathbed—a man who wanted absolution for his crime.
Was he thus an exception?
I could find no answer to that question. How could I know if he would have committed further crimes had he survived?
I have a fairly detailed knowledge of the life story of many Nazi murderers. Few of them were born murderers. They had mostly been peasants, manual laborers, clerks, or officials, such as one meets in normal everyday life. In their youth they had received religious instruction; and none had a previous criminal record. Yet they became murderers, expert murderers by conviction. It was as if they had taken down their SS uniforms from the wardrobe and replaced them with their consciences as well as with their civilian clothes.
I couldn't possibly know their reactions to their first crimes, but I do know that every one of them had subsequently murdered on a wholesale scale.
When I recall the insolent replies and the mocking grins of many of these accused, it is difficult for me to believe that my repentant young SS man would also have behaved in that way…Yet ought I to have forgiven him? Today the world demands that we forgive and forget the heinous crimes committed against us. It urges that we draw a line, and close the account as if nothing had ever happened.
We who suffered in those dreadful days, we who cannot obliterate the hell we endured, are forever being advised to keep silent.
Well, I kept silent when a young Nazi, on his deathbed, begged me to be his confessor. And later when I met his mother I again kept silent rather than shatter her illusions about her dead son's inherent goodness. And how many bystanders kept silent as they watched Jewish men, women, and children being led to the slaughterhouses of Europe?
There are many kinds of silence. Indeed it can be more eloquent than words, and it can be interpreted in many ways.
Was my silence at the bedside of the dying Nazi right or wrong? This is a profound moral question that challenges the conscience of the reader of this episode, just as much as it once challenged my heart and my mind. There are those who can appreciate my dilemma, and so endorse my attitude, and there are others who will be ready to condemn me for refusing to ease the last moment of a repentant murderer.
The crux of the matter is, of course, 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.
You, who have just read this sad and tragic episode in my life, can mentally change places with me and ask yourself the crucial question, “What would I have done?”
SVEN ALKALAJ
On reading The Sunflower, I was greatly interested in and also moved by the events described in the book. Writing as a Bosnian and a Jew, I can state that I now find myself confronted with the same question and dilemma posed by The Sunflower.
After World War II and the Nuremberg Trials, we assumed that what happened to the Jews of Europe would not happen ever again. “Never again.” Again has happened in the very heart of Europe. Events in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the last three-and-a-half years, which have some parallels with the Holocaust, can inform the search for an answer to the question of forgiveness. I do not in any way wish to compare the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina with the Holocaust or to suggest that they are identical. I do wish to state, however, that clear parallels exist in regard to the worth of human life. In Sarajevo, we were forced to live like rats, scavenging for food. Our only access to the outside world ran through a dark and muddy 160-by-180-centimeter tunnel. Even our president had to endure this life-threatening trek. We were forced to live in fear that we would not see tomorrow, knowing that we could be the next victims of the best-planned “indiscriminate” shelling campaign in history. We were forced to endure this hell of a life for almost four years—and now we take pride in having survived the longest siege in the history of modern warfare.
We saw the slaughter of Srebrenica where 8,000 innocents were killed while under the protection of the United Nations. In Bosnia and Herzegovina we've seen entire families perish—children deliberately killed, tortured, and raped—and we've seen rape become a tool of war. Over 10,000 individuals, including 1,700 children, were killed in Sarajevo alone, over 200,000 people throughout the country. Now their final resting places can be found throughout the city—in its former parks, playgrounds, and backyards.
This Bosnian generation, as well as the generation that lived through the Holocaust,
are among the only ones who have the right to give an answer to the question of forgiveness. Indeed, to paraphrase a colleague of Simon's: Nobody who hasn't bodily gone through what we went through will ever be able to understand fully.
If this may seem tangential to the theme of forgiveness, I can assure you that it is not. Although Simon was unsure whether his response to the dying SS man was correct, there was no question as to whether or not he should forget the crimes. It was the images of Eli and the figure of the repentant murderer that remained with Simon. Forgetting the crimes would be worse than forgiving the criminal who seeks forgiveness, because forgetting the crimes devalues the humanity that perished in these atrocities. And, as is correctly pointed out by Simon's colleagues, he had no right to forgive on behalf of the victims. This is where the issues of collective or individual guilt and victimhood must come into play.
Can we, ought we, forgive murderers who are still alive? It is also a question of how much, how quickly, how easily can any individual forgive a mass murderer. Who is entitled to speak on the behalf of the victims? And must one forget before one can forgive? Can I forgive a Serb nationalist gunner who, his breath reeking of plum brandy, lobbed shells into queues of people waiting for bread and water? Or can I forgive the thug who smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol while waiting for a mother or a father, a brother, a sister, a son, or a daughter to enter into his sniper's sight? The simple answer in this context is no.
But that is not the dilemma faced by Simon. His dilemma comes not only because the dying SS man asks for forgiveness, but also because he genuinely seems to recognize his crime and guilt. This recognition, if nothing else, is an important first step.
The question of forgiveness must be defined in individual or collective terms, just as guilt must be defined in individual or collective terms. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serb fanatical leadership has fed its population such venomous propaganda that some innocent Serbs do not know what happened in the past four years. Others do know, but like the father of Karl, felt that they could not act outside the bounds of the mob mentality that swept over much of the victimizer population, both in Nazi Germany and in Serb-occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina. Therefore, at this time, there is no general accounting of what actually happened among some Serb and even Croat people, as was the case with Karl's mother. But without recognition of what happened, there can never be forgiveness. That is exactly why today's war crimes tribunal is so important. Not only will it dispense justice by punishing the guilty, but also it will show what happened during the past four years and would even eventually absolve the innocent. That way, the groundwork for reconciliation would be possible.
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness Page 9