How then will God regard this killer? There are limits to my presumptuousness; I know not God's will. However, in recent years, I have found myself drawn, because of unusual encounters, to the notion of gilgul, reincarnation. Perhaps God will send this man back to this world, and he will live a life in which he resists evil and does much good. I would like to believe that lifetimes of much good can perhaps undo a lifetime of great evil.
But such calculations must be made by God. In this world, I would feel far more sanguine to learn that the various world religions could agree on the desirability of teaching their followers, from childhood on, the significance of moral distinctions; to teach them that forgiveness is almost always a virtue, but to teach them that cruelty is evil and the murder of innocent people an unforgivable evil. In other words, to teach people the harder, more morally worthy path—to repent of irrevocable evil before, not after, they commit it.
TZVETAN TODOROV
What should Simon have done? What would I have done if I had found myself in his place? Let me first answer the question as it stands. The only one who can forgive is the one who has experienced the injury. Every extension by analogy, from the individual to the group, seems to me illegitimate: one cannot forgive by proxy any more than one can be a victim by association or uphold the existence of a collective guilt. Therefore, murder, by definition, cannot be forgiven: the injured party is no longer there to do it. I should add that, since I was not raised as a believing Christian, I have never considered absolution as an essential element of life; justice and morality are far more important to me.
I will therefore try to go a little further to reformulate the question in my own terms: how shall we judge the SS man described by Wiesenthal, and what should we think of him? His guilt is indisputable; what poses a problem is whether we should take account of his regrets and repentance. Experience shows that the great majority of Nazi criminals felt no regret for their actions. At Nuremberg, Speer was the only one who considered himself (partially) guilty. At the Auschwitz trial in 1963, only the former victims felt anguish; the former executioners did not seem to be troubled by pangs of conscience. The same is true for the perpetrators of other atrocities, in other totalitarian countries, or even today, in former Yugoslavia: concentration camp guards, like their superiors, judge themselves not guilty. In this respect, Wiesenthal's SS man is different, and if only to emphasize the exception, he deserves different treatment: not absolution, of course, but recognition for embarking on that specifically human activity which consists of changing for the better (what Rousseau called our perfectibility).
Neither can I ignore the fact that we are raising these questions today, more than fifty years after the event. We are not contemplating an action in the present, but the place of a past action in our memory. What can we do with evil in the past, how can we put it to use in the service of our moral education? Nazi crimes are the sort that render it impossible to confuse values: that evil really did exist and is in no way relative. For that reason alone, we must preserve a living memory of it. The second step in this education would then consist of rejecting the tendency to identify evil pure and simple with the Other, and good with ourselves, and recognizing, as Romain Gary said, that inhumanity is part of being human. Rejecting relativism does not mean embracing a Manichean split between good and evil. It is the complementary interplay of these two aspects of moral judgment, it seems to me, that alone permits us to make judicious use of the past in the present in order to fight today's evils, and not only yesterday's.
DESMOND TUTU
I have been overwhelmed by the depth of depravity and evil that has been exposed by the amnesty process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission appointed to deal with the gross human rights violations that happened in our apartheid past. I am devastated to hear police officers describe how they drugged the coffee of one of their charges, shot him behind the ear, and then set his body on fire. That is bad enough, but it is all made more appalling by the police describing how while this cremation was taking place, they had a barbecue—turning over two sets of meat as it were. That is the one side.
There is also another side—the story of the victims, the survivors who were made to suffer so grievously, yet despite this are ready to forgive. This magnanimity, this nobility of spirit, is quite breathtakingly unbelievable. I have often felt I should say, “Let us take off our shoes,” because at this moment we were standing on holy ground.
So, what would I have done? I answer by pointing to the fact that people who have been tortured, whose loved ones were abducted, killed, and buried secretly—a young widow whose husband's brains were blown out by a booby-trapped tape recorder, a father whose son was killed in a Wimpy Bar bomb explosion—can testify to the Commission and say they are ready to forgive the perpetrators. It is happening before our very eyes. But there are others who say that they are not ready to forgive, demonstrating that forgiveness is not facile or cheap. It is a costly business that makes those who are willing to forgive even more extraordinary.
What would I have done? Our president, Nelson Mandela, was incarcerated for twenty-seven years and not mollycoddled. His eyesight has been ruined because he had to work in the glare of a quarry; his family was harassed by the state security police. He should by rights be consumed by bitterness and a lust for revenge. The world watched with awe when he so magnanimously invited his white jailer to his inauguration as South Africa's first democratically elected president. I could tell of others, both black and white and less well known, who if asked, “What would you have done?” would have done the same—they have forgiven amazingly, unbelievably. Many claim to be Christians. They say they follow the Jewish rabbi who, when he was crucified, said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” I sit and marvel at it all as I preside over the process of seeking to bring healing and reconciliation to a deeply divided, wounded, and traumatized nation.
It is clear that if we look only to retributive justice, then we could just as well close up shop. Forgiveness is not some nebulous thing. It is practical politics. Without forgiveness, there is no future.
ARTHUR WASKOW
I need to address not Simon Wiesenthal but the Nazi he addressed: What would it mean for me to “forgive” you?
First, someone has—you have—shattered the Ultimate Unity by breaking the connections that hold it together—those connections through which human beings and the earth share the world. You have shattered the Four Worlds that are the One World—the Four Worlds our great mystics the Kabbalists used as a profound and convenient map of God's Reality: the Worlds of Doing, Relating, Knowing, and Being. When these are healthy, there is physical wholeness and material sharing; emotional love; intellectual communication; and the spiritual sense of shared presence within the Divine Presence. For me and for my people, you have shattered each of these Four Worlds.
What you ask of me is to join with you to restore this Unity in each of the Four Worlds. To join with you in reconnecting the fragments of the shattered Unity, perhaps into a wholly/holy new pattern of Unity. To make this restoration with you is “forgiveness.” Through it, you and I would give away the physical damage, the emotional upset, the intellectual disjunction, and the spiritual dislocation of my self and my people's self. You and I would return to a place of equilibrium and equanimity.
I cannot do it. This is why: There is no way for you to repair the physical damage to the Jews you yourself murdered, let alone those whose murder and torture you helped organize and celebrate. There is no way for you to repair the rips and tears in relationship that have left the Jewish people still struggling to be able to trust, connect, make peace, to govern itself responsibly with its newfound power in the world. And, in terms of Spirit, there is no way for you to repair our sense of God in hiding.
I may be able to make these repairs for myself (at least the ones in Relationship and Spirit); we Jews may be able together to do these for ourselves; but not with you. You can take no part in these three
repairs. So I cannot “forgive” you.
There is only one of the Four Worlds in which I can even come close to being with you—the World of Knowing: Idea, Intellect.
You are a teacher of what is now possible. From you I learn that the H-bombs can devour the world, that every single one of them is an instant portable Auschwitz waiting for its blaze to be turned on. From you I learn that sadism can be technologized and mass-produced. From you I learn that the careless use of new technology can poison earth's air and soil and water, can murder many species, even when there is no hatred—only envy of each other. From you I learn what the mass media can do to the child of loving, gentle parents.
From you I learn the raw, ravaging Power—one aspect of God—that has come roaring into the world, into human hands.
And therefore, from you, with you, I learn the need to do all the other tikkunim (repairs):
The need to shape a deeper and broader sense of community among the peoples and species of the earth.
The need to create a form of intellect that is connective, in which knowledge is indeed like making love, as it is in the Hebrew word yodaya.
The need to relocate God not Up There on a kingly throne but In Here, among us, between us, within us.
Even the need to redo the physical boundaries of the People Israel, to reawaken our bodies through sacred dance and gesture, to reenliven our physical relationship with the Land and the Earth, to reopen the Song of Songs as a joyful flowering of earthy passion.
I can learn from you the need to do these things, but I cannot do them with you. I can talk with you, but I cannot touch you, love you, or pray with you. So I thank you for being my teacher, and I leave you alone in the three Worlds of Body, Heart, and Spirit—alone, cut off, an alien in the alien corner of the world that you yourself have cut off from the Flow of Life.
HARRY WU
Reading Simon Wiesenthal's autobiographical story brought back a flood of memories about my own experience in China's prison labor camps. I was instantly transported back to my nineteen years in those camps, and I allowed myself to remember some of my experiences with those who were responsible for my imprisonment and with the camp prison guards.
In 1957, everyone at my university, the Geology Institute in Beijing, was forced to participate in “struggle sessions” in which we were to talk about our “capitalist” tendencies and backgrounds. A woman named Comrade Ma led these sessions with a vengeance. In April of 1959, she became insistent that everyone in our class speak out to contribute to the Party's efforts to “rectify” its previous errors. She held a series of meetings for us to air our views in the spirit of the One Hundred Flowers Campaign. During the first meeting, I managed to avoid speaking out my personal opinions.
For the second meeting, I asked to be excused to attend a baseball game as at that time I was the captain of the university's baseball team. When I tried to get out of the third meeting, Comrade Ma became angry and refused to grant me a leave. From that point on, my fate was out of my hands. Comrade Ma had singled me out and repeatedly accused me of “anti-rightist” tendencies.
On April 27, 1960, I was called to attend another struggle session. My heart stopped in fear when I saw on the blackboard the words: “Meeting to Criticize Rightist Wu Hongda.” The person in charge of political education in my department got up and announced: “I now denounce, separate, and expel the rightist Hongda who has consistently refused to mold himself into a good socialist student and has chosen to remain an enemy of the revolution.” That night, I was taken to a local detention center and began my nineteen years of imprisonment.
It was much later when I learned that over one hundred teachers and four hundred students from the Geology Institute had been arrested as rightists. Comrade Ma had been the one chiefly responsible for my imprisonment and those of many others.
During my nineteen years in prison, I often experienced harsh treatment at the hands of guards and prison officials. I was beaten and degraded and to this day, I suffer injuries from the abuses that I suffered. In 1962, I was transferred to Tuanhe Farm labor camp. The conditions were so bleak and horrible that two friends and I attempted to escape. Our failure resulted in harsh punishments for all of us. I was thrown into solitary confinement, a cell that was six feet long, three feet wide, and three feet high, slightly larger than a coffin. I was not given any food or water for three days. When the captain in charge came on the seventh day to hear my “confession” to my crime, he kicked me in the side of my body and left. On the ninth day, when I became too weak to eat any food, the captain ordered the guards to force a tube down my throat to feed me. Finally, I was released back to my barracks.
There were, however, several instances when I was shown kindness by prison guards, which helped me survive such brutality. I remember one winter in 1962—the coldest winter I have ever experienced—where I was imprisoned in Section 585 of Qinghe Farm. We were all huddled in our barracks trying to seek warmth from our thin quilts. All of a sudden, we heard the voice of a new guard, Captain Cao, calling us from outside. We dragged ourselves out of the barracks and braced ourselves against the outside walls. We expected to hear some new form of hardship to add to our horrible situation. But instead, Captain Cao announced that we would be receiving an extra ounce of food rations. He also encouraged us to walk outside in the sun every day to regain our strength. As I would take my short walks, Captain Cao would often encourage me: “You're doing very well. You'll be fine. That's enough for today. Go back to rest.”
I don't know why Captain Cao showed us such kindness. In reality, his acts were small ones, but to us prisoners, who had not been shown any human kindness for months and even years, his acts were enormous. How could someone like Captain and Comrade Ma exist in the same society?
When I was released in 1979, I felt compelled to look up Comrade Ma in Beijing. She had been promoted for her faithful service to the head position of the Political Work Section of the Beijing Geology Bureau. When I met her in person, I realized that I had nothing to say to her. I did not feel the need to reproach her or accuse her of her wrongdoing toward me. I just wanted her to see that I had survived and had not given in to despair and suicide. She never apologized to me or asked for my forgiveness. “It's over, it's over,” she said to me. “All that happened is in the past. The whole country has suffered, our Party has suffered. There have been terrible mistakes. I'm very happy you have come back. We can do something together in the future.”
I looked at her and concluded in those few moments that Comrade Ma was so typical of the kind of people that the Communist society had produced. She believed in everything that the Party had done in the name of its people. As I looked at her that day, I felt a brief moment of triumph. You could not destroy all of us, I said to her silently.
In regard to Mr. Wiesenthal's story and in comparing his story to my own, I must first state that it is inconceivable for me to believe that anyone in the People's Republic of China would ask for such forgiveness as the Nazi soldier did to the Jewish prisoner. In China, there was no understanding that what the Communists did to their own people was in any way morally wrong. People like Comrade Ma were so typical. They had no regard for an individual's well-being. There was no value put on a human's life because, quite simply, the leaders of the country placed no value on human life. In order to survive in China during these times, one had to give up one's own conscience and humanity.
Captain Cao was an aberration of that time. To this day, I do not know how he could have existed and acted in such a way without being caught and punished.
Instead, the society that the Communists founded was designed to drain any remnants of humanity out of a person. Like Mr. Wiesenthal, I would not have forgiven the Nazi soldier on his deathbed, but I would have been able to say to him: “I understand why you were a part of a horrible and vicious society. You are responsible for your own actions but everyone else in this society shares that same responsibility with you.”
CONTRIBUT
ORS
SVEN ALKALAJ is the ambassador of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the United States, the first to serve in this position. He was formerly a prominent businessman with “Energoinvest” Sarajevo, the largest company in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Born in 1948, he is a descendant of a well-known Jewish family in Sarajevo which traces its ancestry to Spain's “Golden Age” of Sephardic Jewry.
JEAN AMÉRY was one of Europe's most profound critics and essayists. Fleeing his native Vienna after the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws, he joined the Resistance in Belgium, where he was subsequently captured by the Gestapo and sent to a series of concentration camps. After the war, he made his home in Belgium until his death in 1978. At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities is his unflinching analysis of his own inner world as a Holocaust victim and survivor.
SMAIL BALI, a leading expert on oriental languages, Arab-Islamic history, and Bosnian culture, was born in Mostar in 1920 and earned his doctorate at the University of Vienna. He lived in Vienna for many years, where he lectured on the Turkish language at the Superior School of Commerce. Currently he is a professor in the Department of Islamic-Theological Studies at the University of Sarajevo. Through his scholarly work he seeks to strengthen the cultural and national identity of his people, the Muslim-Bosnians. He is the author of Das unbekannte Bosnien (The unknown Bosnia).
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness Page 24