The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

by Simon Wiesenthal

  Again, who should be the object of our forgiveness or our revenge?

  You are a man of high principle, and although you relate the story of the SS man and his victims, the proceedings which initially were directed against the murderer end with the Nazi system as the prisoner at the bar. Here our paths diverge.

  For the regime we are discussing there is no “problem” of forgiveness. The crimes of the regime were unforgivable, the regime has been tried and destroyed. Meanwhile we are faced not with Mephistopheles, but with Faust. Corruption, though a force of permanent duration, cannot exist without collaboration from the corrupted. The corrupted, in a word, are not victims of the corrupters, but collaborators. With the words “Terrible vision!” Faust turns away, but the ghost rightly defends himself: “You invited me cordially, you have long dabbled in my domain…You have passionately striven to see me, to hear my voice, to gaze on my countenance…”

  The firm is Faust & Co. or, if you prefer it, Mephistopheles & Co., partners just like Hitler and Karl S. The proof lies in the counterproof. The devilish Nazi regime did not corrupt everybody, and of those whom it corrupted most stopped at murder. I cannot accept the excuse that the system relieves the individual of responsibility. Walt Whitman says: “To the States, or to any individual State, or to any city among the States, offer strong resistance and little obedience!” Resistance to evil is not heroism but a duty. Anyone who thinks that he can get rid of evil “in itself” in the world is a victim of megalomania, and who knows whether megalomania in itself does not contain the germs of evil? The important thing is to strengthen the resistance to evil.

  Here, in my view, lies the true problem of forgiveness, and here perhaps we approach the answer as to whom we ought to forgive and when.

  Mankind will stay as it is—in itself a terrible prospect—if the principles of love and justice remain obstinately separated instead of complementing each other. Looking on the question from this angle, you will find that in the history of man since the beginning of Creation, love and justice have opposed each other. At one period justice was the human ideal, at another, love. The divine idea of justice in love, love in justice, mankind has magnanimously left to the Creator.

  Forgiveness is the imitation of God. Punishment too is an imitation of God. God punishes and forgives, in that order. But God never hates. That is the moral value worth striving for, but perhaps unattainable.

  You write at the end of The Sunflower: I know that many will understand me and approve of my attitude to the dying SS man. But I know also that just as many will condemn me because I refused to ease the last hours of a repentant murderer.

  I belong to neither class of reader. It seems to me immaterial whether you forgave the SS murderer or not, for Providence relieved him of life and punishment, and your conscience from the burden of decision. But at least you did not hate the dying murderer, and that is a beginning. To forgive without justice is a self-satisfying weakness. Justice without love is a simulation of strength.

  One of the worst crimes of the Nazi regime was that it made it so hard for us to forgive. It led us into the labyrinth of our souls. We must find a way out of the labyrinth—not for the murderers’ sake, but for our own. Neither love alone expressed in forgiveness, nor justice alone, exacting punishment, will lead us out of the maze. A demand for both atonement and forgiveness is not self-contradictory; when a man has willfully extinguished the life of another, atonement is the prerequisite for forgiveness. Exercised with love and justice, atonement and forgiveness serve the same end: life without hatred. That is our goal: I see no other.

  YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI

  Wiesenthal's encounter with the dying Karl occurs in a dimension beyond our understanding and judgment. Presuming the right to judge Wiesenthal, the camp inmate, reveals a lack of humility. It risks repeating the mistake of those who didn't experience the Holocaust but who readily condemned its survivors—for not violently resisting, for supposedly collaborating, for remaining alive. The very fact that Wiesenthal and his fellow prisoners debated the question of forgiving Karl is more than we have the right to expect of them.

  But we are permitted to judge Wiesenthal the postwar survivor. By deciding to rejoin our world rather than enter a bitter seclusion, he and other survivors assumed the burden of moral normalcy: from 1945 onward, they would be measured by the same standards as the rest of us; their wartime suffering couldn't serve as refuge from scrutiny of their postwar lives.

  In responding to Wiesenthal's story, then, I begin where I have the right to begin: with his encounter with Karl's mother, in 1946. Here, there is no moral ambiguity. Rather than tell her the truth about Karl, Wiesenthal allows this woman who has lost everything to at least retain a mother's pride in her son. He rejects his opportunity for vicarious vengeance against the innocent; whatever happened “there” cannot justify cruelty “here.” Refusal to forgive belongs to that time and place, not ours.

  That simple message took me a long time to learn. Though born after the war, I was one of those Jews who tried to isolate Germany in a cordon of untouchability. I refused to visit Germany or buy German products. When I'd meet Germans my age, I related to them with blatant distaste, delighting in their discomfort. I wanted the Germans—all Germans who identified with that poisoned culture—to be exiled from humanity.

  Finally, I traveled to Germany in November 1989 as a journalist. The Berlin Wall had just been breached. In the frozen evenings I joined the dense crowds moving in slow motion along the Ku'damm, West Berlin's main avenue, and was reminded, to my dismay, of Jerusalem in the weeks after the Six-Day War: the same dazed joy, the same incredulous sense of crossing inviolate borders. To exclude myself from the Germans’ celebration, I felt, was to deny myself an essential human experience, exiling myself from humanity.

  During that same trip I visited a Protestant youth club in West Berlin, “Meerbaum House,” named for a German Jew killed in the Holocaust. A poster on a wall announced a trip to Poland, to help clean the sites of former death camps; other posters supported various liberal and fringe radical causes, from antiapartheid rallies to Amnesty International to the Sandinistas. One felt that the dead Jew Meerbaum was the dominant presence of this place, that the young people here were offering their notion of altruistic politics to his memory.

  I asked those teenagers whether they felt any pride in being German. They laughed. Did they feel excitement when the Wall fell? Blank stares. I thought of the enthusiasm with which Israelis their age react to a national triumph—the rescue of an endangered Diaspora community, a successful attack against a terrorist leader, and it seemed to me that, as a people, we had emerged from the Holocaust with our life force more intact than had the Germans. The young people of Meerbaum House appeared so intimidated by the Holocaust that they couldn't allow themselves to share their people's celebration. But instead of taking a grim pleasure in their shame, I felt the emptiness of revenge against the guiltless. And I found myself actually urging them not to allow the past to distort the present, not to allow Auschwitz to deny them a moment of well-earned self-respect.

  Certainly I don't believe that Germans or Jews should obscure the memory of the past. But since that encounter in Berlin I have become increasingly committed to German-Jewish reconciliation. Wiesenthal's humane gesture toward Karl's mother reinforces for me the sense that, just as we are commanded to remember all our Egypts, there are times when we must also transcend them. For Wiesenthal the survivor, behaving graciously toward the mother of an SS officer required moral courage; for the rest of us, treating a new generation with decency requires only moral common sense.

  ARTHUR HERTZBERG

  This personal history of the dying soldier made him more, and not less, guilty. This young man had not drifted into being a Nazi, for he was raised by a mother who was a pious Catholic and a father who never wavered in his opposition to Hitler and his followers. When he decided to join the Hitler Youth, his mother did not put up much of a struggle, but his father was vehe
mently opposed. The teenager would not listen, at fourteen, and he was even more defiant when he enlisted in the SS, but on his deathbed he remembered that he had been taught better. He could not, as some convinced Nazis did, “jump gladly into the grave” knowing that they had, at least, succeeded in destroying almost all of the Jews of Europe. He chose to do evil when he was sure that the murderers whom he chose to join would succeed. The Nazi regime did allow “faint-hearted” soldiers to ask for other assignments. Had he heeded that impulse, he could have avoided committing horrible crimes with his own hands, but he chose to slaughter innocent people. Even if he was not entirely sure that the “racially inferior” should be exterminated, he did know that murdering such “non-people” would elicit special benefits for him from a victorious Nazi regime.

  Simon Wiesenthal perhaps did not remember, at that tense moment beside the soldier's bed, the teaching in the Talmud that no one has the right to commit murder even if he is sure that he himself will be killed for not complying with such an order. In the text of the Talmud there is the explanation: “How do you know your blood is more precious?” The dying member of the SS should have risked losing his own life rather than become a racist murderer or a careerist killer. He had asked for a Jew, any Jew, to come to his bedside so that he could make his peace with his victims, and with God.

  Wiesenthal said nothing, and he was right. The crimes in which this SS man had taken part are beyond forgiveness by man, and even by God, for God Himself is among the accused.

  When He proposed (according to the account in the Book of Genesis) to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because they were sinful, Abraham protested: “Would God destroy the righteous together with the wicked?” In the story in Genesis, God agreed that if there were as many as ten righteous people in these sinful cities, he would spare them, but Abraham could not find even this small number. But, in this dialogue with Abraham, the Judge of all the earth did agree that He, too, must act justly; he accepted the premise that he has no right to destroy the just. In our time, we must ask Abraham's question: among the victims, there were many righteous and holy people, and more than a million children who had not known sin. On the evidence of the “debate” in Genesis, Abraham could not have forgiven God for willing, or allowing, such cruelty. God can perhaps be defended by the answer that He gave to Job: the Divine plan is beyond human understanding. I cannot swallow the further extension of this argument, that the Nazis were instruments devised by God to help Him realize his unknowable design. Surely, it is not beyond His power to achieve whatever He wants in the world without the near total murder of a people. Can anyone dare forgive the Nazis, and their helpers, in the name of the hidden and silent God who stood by the Holocaust? No doubt, as the Catholic he had once been, the SS soldier thought that words of contrition would get him Divine absolution. Perhaps, after Wiesenthal left, he confessed to a priest and was given the last rites and assured of Divine forgiveness. But the God who had allowed the Holocaust did not, and does not, have the standing to forgive the monsters who had carried out the murders.

  On the other hand, when Simon Wiesenthal visited the dead soldier's mother in Stuttgart some months later, he was right not to deprive her of her illusions about her son. He did not visit his sins on her. Wiesenthal obeyed the biblical injunction that each of us dies for his own sins, and not even for those of our children or of our parents. He could not tell this mother the truth, for the truth would have destroyed her, even if she had continued to live on as a physical being.

  These reflections were not elicited from me only by contemplating the moving story that Wiesenthal has told. I was born in Lubaczów, Galicia, in 1921 and escaped the Holocaust because my family was in the United States by 1926. I cannot make peace with my own generation of Germans and their collaborators in the satellite countries, because my contemporaries could have refused to join the Nazis, but the majority hailed Hitler to the day of his defeat and death. I remember my own relatives—a grandfather, many uncles and aunts and their children—and I cannot fathom the mentality of those who murdered them for being Jews. Those who say that they are sorry and ashamed, I can only leave to their own guilt. I am just as pained by the attempts to “explain” the Holocaust. These writings may, sometimes, be full of historical insights, or even ingenious theology, but together they obscure and cover over a question that can never be answered: Why did man, and God, fail so horribly? Together with Simon Wiesenthal, who said nothing at the deathbed of the SS soldier, we can only be silent.

  THEODORE M. HESBURGH

  Who am I to advise a person of another religion who has suffered incredibly more than I have? I would not ordinarily presume to do so, but I was requested to do so, so I do.

  My whole instinct is to forgive. Perhaps that is because I am a Catholic priest. In a sense, I am in the forgiving business. I sit in a confessional for hours and forgive everyone who comes in, confesses, and is sorry.

  I think of God as the great forgiver of sinful humanity. The greatest story of Jesus is the Prodigal Son. Can we aspire to be as forgiving of each other as God is of us?

  Of course, the sin here is monumental. It is still finite and God's mercy is infinite.

  If asked to forgive, by anyone for anything, I would forgive because God would forgive. If I had suffered as so many had, it might be much more difficult, but I hope I would still be forgiving, not from my own small position but as a surrogate for our almighty and all-forgiving God.

  ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL

  Over fifty years ago, the rabbi of Brisk, a scholar of extraordinary renown, revered also for his gentleness of character, entered a train in Warsaw to return to his hometown. The rabbi, a man of slight stature, and of no distinction of appearance, found a seat in a compartment. There he was surrounded by traveling salesmen, who, as soon as the train began to move, started to play cards. As the game progressed, the excitement increased. The rabbi remained aloof and absorbed in meditation. Such aloofness was annoying to the rest of the people and one of them suggested to the rabbi to join in the game. The rabbi answered that he never played cards. As time passed, the rabbi's aloofness became even more annoying and one of those present said to him: “Either you join us, or leave the compartment.” Shortly thereafter, he took the rabbi by his collar and pushed him out of the compartment. For several hours the rabbi had to stand on his feet until he reached his destination, the city of Brisk.

  Brisk was also the destination of the salesmen. The rabbi left the train where he was immediately surrounded by admirers welcoming him and shaking his hands. “Who is this man?” asked the salesman. “You don't know him? The famous rabbi of Brisk.” The salesman's heart sank. He had not realized who he had offended. He quickly went over to the rabbi to ask forgiveness. The rabbi declined to forgive him. In his hotel room, the salesman could find no peace. He went to the rabbi's house and was admitted to the rabbi's study. “Rabbi,” he said, “I am not a rich man. I have, however, savings of three hundred rubles. I will give them to you for charity if you will forgive me.” The rabbi's answer was brief: “NO.”

  The salesman's anxiety was unbearable. He went to the synagogue to seek solace. When he shared his anxiety with some people in the synagogue, they were deeply surprised. How could their rabbi, so gentle a person, be so unforgiving. Their advice was for him to speak to the rabbi's eldest son and to tell him of the surprising attitude taken by his father.

  When the rabbi's son heard the story, he could not understand his father's obstinacy. Seeing the anxiety of the man, he promised to discuss the matter with his father.

  It is not proper, according to Jewish law, for a son to criticize his father directly. So the son entered his father's study and began a general discussion of Jewish law and turned to the laws of forgiveness. When the principle was mentioned that a person who asks for forgiveness three times should be granted forgiveness, the son mentioned the name of the man who was in great anxiety. Thereupon the rabbi of Brisk answered:

  “I cannot forgive him. He
did not know who I was. He offended a common man. Let the salesman go to him and ask for forgiveness.”

  No one can forgive crimes committed against other people. It is therefore preposterous to assume that anybody alive can extend forgiveness for the suffering of any one of the six million people who perished.

  According to Jewish tradition, even God Himself can only forgive sins committed against Himself, not against man.

  SUSANNAH HESCHEL

  I would have done exactly as Simon Wiesenthal did.

  Since the war, Wiesenthal's questions have taken on even more practical significance than they did for him in the camp that one day. Can we forgive the Nazis their crimes? Can we forgive the German people?

  In Judaism, where forgiveness requires both atonement and restitution, there are two sins that can never be forgiven: murder and destroying someone's reputation. In these two situations atonement is possible, but not forgiveness. A murdered person, after all, cannot forgive the murderer, and a good reputation can never be restored. The Holocaust involved both of these sins: murder and the defamation of the Jewish people through anti-Semitic propaganda. No matter how much atonement is expressed for these crimes, no restitution is possible, and no forgiveness can follow.