The Sunflower

by Simon Wiesenthal

I stood up and looked in his direction, at his folded hands. Between them there seemed to rest a sunflower.

  At last I made up my mind and without a word I left the room.

  The nurse was not outside the door. I forgot where I was and did not go back down the staircase up which the nurse had brought me. As I used to do in student days, I went downstairs to the main entrance and it was not until I saw surprised looks from the nurses and doctors that I realized I was taking the wrong way down. But I did not retreat. Nobody stopped me and I walked through the main door into the open air and returned to my comrades…The sun at its zenith was blazing down.

  My comrades were sitting on the grass spooning soup out of their mess tins. I too was hungry, and just in time to get the last of the soup. The hospital had made us all a present of a meal.

  But my thoughts were still with the dying SS man. The encounter with him was a heavy burden on me, his confession had profoundly disturbed me.

  “Where have you been all this time?” asked somebody. I did not know his name. He had been marching beside me the whole way from the camp to the hospital.

  “I was beginning to think you had made a bolt for it which would have meant a nice reception for us back in the camp.”

  I did not reply.

  “Did you get anything?” he asked as he peered into the empty bread sack, which, like every other prisoner, I carried over my shoulder. He looked at me suspiciously, as to imply: you've got something, but won't admit it for fear of having to share it with us.

  I let him think what he liked and said nothing.

  “Are you annoyed with me?” he questioned.

  “No,” said I. I didn't want to talk to him—not at that moment.

  After a short pause we resumed work. There seemed to be no end to the containers which we had to empty. The trucks which carried the rubbish to be burnt somewhere in the open kept coming back incessantly. Where did they take all this refuse? But really I did not care. The only thing I desired was to get away from this place.

  At long last we were told to stop work, and to come back the next day to cart away more rubbish. I went cold when I heard this.

  On the way back to the camp our guards, the askaris, didn't seem to be in a singing mood. They marched along beside us in silence and did not even urge us on. We were all tired, even I, who had spent most of the day in a sickroom. Had it really lasted several hours? Again and again my thoughts returned to that macabre encounter.

  On the footpaths, past which we were marching, people were staring at us. I could not distinguish one face from another, they all seemed to be exactly alike—probably because they were all so utterly indifferent to us in spite of their stares.

  Anyhow, why should they behave otherwise? They were long since used to the sight of us. Of what concern were we to them? A few might later on suffer the pangs of conscience for gawking at doomed men so callously.

  We were not walking fast, because a horse and cart in front impeded us. I had time to conjecture that among these people must be many who had once been amused at the “day without the Jews” in the High School, and I asked myself if it was only the Nazis who had persecuted us. Was it not just as wicked for people to look on quietly and without protest at human beings enduring such shocking humiliation? But in their eyes were we human beings at all?

  Two days before, some newcomers at the camp had told us a very sad but also a very characteristic story. Three Jews had been hanged in public. They were left swinging on the gallows, and a witty fellow had fastened to each body a piece of paper bearing the words “kosher meat.” The bystanders had split their sides with laughter at this brilliant joke, and there was a constant stream of spectators to share in the merriment. A woman who disapproved of the vile obscenity was promptly beaten up.

  We all knew that at public executions the Nazis were at pains to encourage large audiences. They hoped thus to terrify the populace and so stifle any further resistance. Of course they were well aware of the anti-Jewish feeling of most onlookers. These executions corresponded to the “bread and circuses” of ancient Rome, and the ghastly scenes staged by the Nazis were by no means generally resented. All of us in camp were tireless in describing every detail of the horrors we had witnessed. Some talked as if they had just got home after a circus performance. Perhaps some of those who were now standing on the pavement and gaping at us were people who would gape at gibbeted Jews. I heard laughter—perhaps the show they were witnessing, a march past of kosher meat, tickled their fancy.

  At the end of Grodezka Street we turned left into Janowska Street and we were brought to a halt to let a string of crowded tramcars go past. People clung to the doors like bunches of grapes, tired but happy people struggling to get home to their families, where they would spend the evening together, playing cards, discussing politics, listening to the radio—perhaps even listening to forbidden foreign transmissions. They all had one thing in common: they had dreams and hopes. We, on the other hand, had to attend the evening roll call and perform gymnastic exercises laid down according to the mood of the officer in charge. Often doing interminable knee bends until the officer tired of his joke. Or there awaited us the “vitamin B” exercise in which hour after hour we had to carry planks through a lane of SS men. Evening work was dubbed “vitamins,” but unlike the real vitamins, these killed not cured.

  If a man was missing at roll call, they would count us over and over again, and then in place of the missing man they would take any ten of his comrades out of the ranks and execute them as a deterrent to the other would-be absentees.

  And the same thing would happen tomorrow, and perhaps the day after tomorrow, until we were all gone.

  Thoughts of tomorrow…made me think of the dying SS man with his bandaged head. Tomorrow or perhaps the day after tomorrow he would get his sunflower. For me, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, perhaps a mass grave waited. Indeed at any moment the order might come to clear the hut in which I and my comrades slept—or I might be one of the ten to be selected as a deterrent.

  One day a rumor ran round the camp that fresh prisoners were arriving from the provinces. If so, there would be no room in our existing huts, and if the camp authorities couldn't raise any new ones, they would make room in another way. Quite a simple matter, they simply liquidated the original prisoners—hut by hut, to make room for the newcomers. It happened every two months. It accelerated the natural decrease in our numbers, and the goal of making Galicia and Lemberg “Jew-free” grew ever nearer.

  The narrow-fronted houses in Janowska Street were a dirty gray and showed traces of war damage: bullet marks on the house fronts and windows boarded up, sometimes merely with cardboard. Janowska Street was one of the most important arteries in Lemberg, and violent fighting had taken place there when the Germans had captured the city.

  At the end of the rows of houses we passed once again the military cemetery with its long lines of graves, but somehow the sunflowers looked different now. They were facing in another direction. The evening sunshine gave them a reddish tinge, and they trembled gently in the breeze. They seemed to be whispering to each other. Were they horrified by the ragged men who were marching past on tired feet? The colors of the sunflowers—orange and yellow, gold and brown—danced before my eyes. They grew in a fertile brown soil, from carefully tended mounds—and behind them grew gnarled trees forming a dark background, and above everything the deep-blue clear sky.

  As we neared camp, the askaris gave the order to sing, and to march in step and proper formation. The commandant might be watching the return of his prisoners and he insisted they must always march out singing and (apparently) happy, and return in the same way. The askaris had to help him to keep up the pretense. We must radiate contentment—and singing was part of it.

  Woe to us if our performance did not satisfy the commandant! We suffered for it. The askaris too would have nothing to laugh at—after all they were only Russians.

  Luckily the commandant was nowhere to be seen so we
marched into camp behind another working party unobserved and fell in on the parade ground for roll call.

  I saw Arthur in another column and waved to him furtively. I was dying to tell him about my experience in the hospital, and also to tell Josek.

  I wondered what these two men so different from each other would have to say. I also wanted to talk to them about the sunflowers. Why had we never noticed them before? They had been in flower for weeks. Had nobody noticed them? Or was I the only person for whom they had any significance?

  We were lucky, roll call was over sooner than usual and I touched Arthur on the shoulder.

  “Well, how was it? Hard work?” He smiled at me in a friendly way.

  “Not so bad. Do you know where I was?”

  “No. How should I know?”

  “At the Technical High School.”

  “Really? But in a different capacity than formerly!”

  “You may well say that.”

  “You look rather depressed,” Arthur remarked.

  I did not reply. The men were crowding toward the kitchen and soon we were standing in a queue waiting for the food issue.

  Josek came past us with his mess tin full. He nodded to us.

  We sat on the steps in front of the hut door eating our food and on the parade ground stood groups of prisoners telling each other of the day's happenings. Some of them perhaps had succeeded in scrounging oddments during their work outside the camp and they were now exchanging these among each other.

  My gaze wandered to the “pipe,” a narrow, fenced passage running round the inner camp and ending at the sandhills where the executions usually took place.

  Sometimes men waited for two or three days in the “pipe” before they were murdered. The SS fetched them out of the huts or arrested them in the city, where they had been in hiding. They operated a “rational” system of shooting a number of men together, so several days would sometimes pass before the number was large enough to warrant the SS executioner's effort to make his way to the sandhills.

  On that particular evening there was nothing to be seen in the “pipe.” Arthur told me why. “There were five today but they had not long to wait. Kauzor fetched them. A fellow in our hut knew them and said they had been unearthed in a good hiding place in the city.”

  Arthur spoke calmly and quietly as if he was recounting something very commonplace.

  “There was a boy among them,” he continued after a while, and now his voice was a little more emotional. “He had lovely fair hair. He didn't look the slightest bit Jewish. If his parents had put him into an Aryan family, he would never have been noticed.”

  I thought of Eli.

  “Arthur, I must talk to you. In the High School, which they are now using as a military hospital, I had an experience today which I am not finished with. You might laugh at me when you hear it, but I want to know just what you think about it. I have faith in your judgment.”

  “Go on,” he said.

  “No, not now. We will talk about it later. I want Josek to be there to hear it.”

  Was I right after all to tell them what had happened? I thought of the five men in the “pipe” who had been shot that day. Was this SS man more to me than they were? Perhaps it was better to keep my mouth shut about what I had heard in the hospital death chamber.

  I feared that Arthur, the cynic, might say: “Just look at him; he can't forget a dying SS man while countless Jews are tortured and killed every hour.” He might add: “You have let yourself be infected by the Nazis. You are beginning to think that the Germans are in some way superior, and that's why you are worrying about your dying SS man.”

  This would hurt me and then no doubt Arthur would tell me about the unspeakable crimes that the Nazis had committed. I would be ashamed of myself. So perhaps it was better to keep to myself what had happened in the hospital.

  I strolled over to the parade ground and chatted to some acquaintances.

  Suddenly one of them hissed: “Six!” That was the agreed warning that SS men were approaching, I hurried back to Arthur and sat down by him as the two SS men walked to the bandsmen's hut.

  “What were you going to tell us?” asked Arthur.

  “I have been thinking it over and I don't want to talk about it. You might not understand or…”

  “Or what? Tell us,” Arthur insisted.

  I was silent.

  “All right, as you like.” Arthur stood up. He seemed annoyed.

  But two hours later I told them the story. We were sitting in our stuffy hut on our bunks. I told them about our march through the city and about the sunflowers.

  “Have either of you ever noticed them?”

  “Of course I have,” said Josek. “What is so special about them?”

  I was reluctant to tell him the impression the sunflowers had made on me. I could not say I had envied the dead Germans their sunflowers or that I had been seized with a childish longing to have a sunflower of my own.

  Arthur joined in: “Well, sunflowers are something to please the eye. The Germans after all are great romantics. But flowers aren't much use to those rotting under the earth. The sunflowers will rot away like them; next year there won't be a trace unless someone plants new ones. But who knows what's going to happen next year?” he added scornfully.

  I continued my story. I described how the nurse had fetched me and taken me to the Dean's room, and then I told them in detail of the dying SS man by whose bed I had sat for hours, and of his confession. To the child who had leaped to death with his father I gave the name of Eli.

  “How did the man know the child's name?” asked one of them.

  “He didn't. I gave him the name because it reminded me of a boy in the Lemberg Ghetto.”

  They all seemed grimly fascinated by my story and once when I paused to gather my thoughts they urged me to go on.

  When I finally described how the dying man had pleaded with me to pardon his crime and how I had left him without saying a word, I noticed a slight smile appear on Josek's face. I was sure it signified his agreement with my action and I nodded to him.

  It was Arthur who first broke the silence: “One less!” he exclaimed.

  The two words expressed exactly what we all felt in those days but Arthur's reaction somehow disturbed me. One of the men, Adam—he seldom wasted words—said thoughtfully: “So you saw a murderer dying…I would like to do that ten times a day. I couldn't have enough such hospital visits.”

  I understood his cynicism. Adam had studied architecture, but had had to abandon his career when the war broke out. During the Russian occupation he worked on building sites. All his family possessions had been nationalized by the Russians. When in the summer of 1940 the great wave of deportations to Siberia began, embracing all of “bad social origin” (i.e., especially members of the well-to-do classes), he and his family had hidden for weeks.

  At our first meeting after his arrival in the camp he had said: “You see it was worthwhile hiding from the Russians. If they had caught me I should now be in Siberia. As it is I am still in Lemberg. Whether this may be an advantage…”

  He was completely indifferent to his surroundings. His fiancée was in the Ghetto but he rarely had news from her. She must have been working in some army formation.

  His parents, to whom he was deeply devoted, had perished in the very first days after the German occupation. Sometimes in his disregard for his surroundings he seemed to me like a sleepwalker. He grew more and more remote, and at first we could not rightly understand why. But gradually we all came to resemble him. We too had lost most of our relatives.

  My story had apparently roused Arthur a little from his apathy, but for a long time nothing more was said by any of my listeners.

  Then Arthur got up and went to a bunk where a friend of his was retailing the radio news. And the others went about their own business.

  Only Josek stayed with me.

  “Do you know,” he began, “when you were telling us about your meeting with the
SS man, I feared at first, that you had really forgiven him. You would have had no right to do this in the name of people who had not authorized you to do so. What people have done to you yourself, you can, if you like, forgive and forget. That is your own affair. But it would have been a terrible sin to burden your conscience with other people's sufferings.”

  “But aren't we a single community with the same destiny, and one must answer for the other,” I interrupted.

  “Be careful, my friend,” continued Josek. “In each person's life there are historic moments which rarely occur—and today you have experienced one such. It is not a simple problem for you…I can see you are not entirely pleased with yourself. But I assure you that I would have done the same as you did. The only difference perhaps is that I would have refused my pardon quite deliberately and openly and yet with a clear conscience. You act more unconsciously. And now you don't know whether it was right or wrong. But believe me it was right. You have suffered nothing because of him, and it follows that what he has done to other people you are in no position to forgive.”

  Josek's face was transfigured.

  “I believe in Haolam Emes—in life after death, in another, better world, where we will all meet again after we are dead. How would it seem then if you had forgiven him? Would not the dead people from Dnepropetrovsk come to you and ask: ‘Who gave you the right to forgive our murderer?’”

  I shook my head thoughtfully. “Josek,” I said, “you make it all sound so simple, probably because your faith is strong. I could argue with you for hours, although I would not want to alter my actions—even if I could. I will only say one thing, and I am anxious to know what you think: the fellow showed a deep and genuine repentance, he did not once try to excuse what he had done. I saw that he was really in torment…”

  Josek interrupted: “Such torment is only a small part of his punishment.”

  “But,” I continued, “he has no time left to repent or atone for his crimes.”

  “What do you mean by ‘atone for’?”

  He now had me where he wanted me: I had no reply. I dropped the argument and tried another gambit.