The Sunflower

by Simon Wiesenthal

  The question to be asked is not should the prisoner have forgiven the SS man but could the prisoner have forgiven him? The prisoner could have told the soldier that he personally forgave him because he was different from his fellow SS soldiers who had shown no remorse. But this Jew could not have offered the soldier atonement. The SS man had done nothing against him specifically. The Jews who had been burned to death by this soldier had not authorized anyone to forgive on their behalf.

  The prisoner's dilemma has contemporary reverberations. Jews are often asked by non-Jews, “Isn't it time ‘you Jews’ forgave the German perpetrators? Isn't it time you forgot?” (It is interesting to note that few other people who have suffered the consequences of persecution, including persecution of a far less heinous nature, are asked this question.) When asked, I respond that I am yet to encounter a perpetrator who is actually seeking forgiveness. Citizens of Germany, Austria, and other countries which took part in the Holocaust who were born after the Holocaust bear no direct guilt for what happened. They may bear a national responsibility and their country may have an indelible blot on its historical record, but they bear no direct guilt. More importantly, even if I did encounter a perpetrator asking forgiveness, who am I to offer forgiveness? I cannot speak on behalf of those who have been wronged—particularly those who have been killed.

  Ultimately we have no way of knowing if the soldier had actually performed complete teshuvah. This SS soldier who lay on his deathbed did not have the ability to repeat his heinous crimes. Would he have felt so contrite if he had not been at death's door? It is also important to remember that the soldier's apparently genuine struggle with his past did not obviate his responsibility to bear the punishment for what he had done. Even if the prisoner had offered the soldier verbal forgiveness, that would not have resulted in an automatic cleansing of the slate. Such atonement would only have come when the guilty man had borne the consequences of his act and had demonstrated by his subsequent behavior that he had returned to that “place” he had occupied prior to committing his heinous crime.

  FRANKLIN H. LITTELL

  Guilt is the question. The problem of the dying perpetrator was the fact that the only human persons who could have forgiven him were dead.

  This story is told repeatedly in discussions of the Holocaust and its perpetrators and complicit spectators. The question of individual guilt slides easily into collective guilt. The matter of moral guilt arises inevitably from the fact of political guilt that is displayed to view.

  Christians believe that in the end only a Divine intervention can clarify and release the soul burdened with guilt. They also believe that God loves the broken-hearted penitent. No person or nation, however, will “turn from the ways of evil” and “turn again unto the Lord” without a strong sense of the reality of sin and guilt.

  During the more than four decades since Rafael Lemkin coined the term “genocide,” progress on both fronts—political and moral—has been slow. But to date the scholars and statesmen have moved further in creating the structures to inhibit and punish the slaughter of targeted ethnic, religious, and cultural groups than the religionists have moved to create the moral and religious energy to outlaw genocide and enforce the laws against it.

  The political leaders seem less afraid of exercising the power to restrain the incidence of genocide than the religious leaders are to proclaim the sin and guilt of the perpetrators and the bystanders. Perhaps this is because—again—the leaders of the churches of “Christendom” have not yet allowed their imaginations to transport them to the SS man's deathbed moment of crystal clarity.

  In the meantime, the civilized world is struggling to find legal ways, insulated by due process of law, to punish criminals guilty of genocide. The principle was staked out at Nuremberg, and it became part of international law with the Genocide Convention. Now the first efforts are being made to punish perpetrators of genocidal acts in the ruins of Yugoslavia.

  Many feel despair that the way is so difficult. But there are always time lags between the several stages in translating moral and religious guilt into civil and juridical guilt. First there is the realization that some wickedness is not like an earthquake or a flood: it is wrong, and someone did it. Then there is the time lag until the thought penetrates the communal mind that if someone did it, that person can be punished (and others so inclined be discouraged). There follows the time lag until the crime is defined and punishment decreed for perpetrators. Finally, there is a time lag until the laws that are on the books generally can be enforced.

  This has been the sequence in the history of murder, polygamy, dueling, feuding, infanticide, slavery, and a dozen other greater or lesser evils that were sins before they were seen as crimes and treated as matters of criminal law. Rather than being discouraged by our seeming impotence in the face of great genocidal evils in Rwanda, Burundi, “Bosnia,” and elsewhere, we might take courage in the thought that everyone is miserable about it. We are in the time of the last “lag,” when the law is written down but enforcement is partial and sporadic.

  In earlier times there was neither hesitation nor embarrassment on the part of rulers. The makers and shakers of primitive societies have always piled the skulls high to vaunt their power over others. Then came the stage when civilized peoples didn't like what they heard but felt unable to do anything to limit and/or punish the crime. “That's the way things are” was the general and fatalistic expression, and a few generations ago it would have been applied to the horrendous crimes committed by all sides in the ruins of Yugoslavia. Now the spectators are all miserable, and that is a sign of progress.

  In the not too distant future the last gap will be closed, and the murder of peoples—widespread before the word “genocide” was even invented—will be inhibited by law and criminals who breach the law in this sector will be punished.

  On the moral and religious front, progress is less evident.

  What was the guilt of the German, Croatian, Austrian, French, Ukrainian, and Baltic churchmen who were either running with the perpetrators or at least complicit spectators of the genocide of the Jews? What was the guilt of those American churchmen who were eager to remain bystanders during the Holocaust?

  So far, the Christian establishments are in a “full press” defensive formation. Only in a rare case, such as the January 1980 Declaration of the Protestant Church of the Rhineland, have the Christian social and/or legal establishments in Europe and America dug deeper than pious expressions of regret for “anti-Judaic teaching” and sometime anti-Jewish “race prejudice.” The Christian doctrines of Sin and Guilt are thereby whittled down to the relatively painless pagan idea of error or mistaken judgment.

  The Christian churches have yet to confront the truth that during the Holocaust there opened up a yawning chasm between traditional Christian words and actual Christian actions and inactions. The guilt that rests upon Christendom is more than the sum total of individual mistakes, and it has confronted the faith with a credibility crisis. Among outsiders, cynicism and atheism have been fortified. Among communicants or constituents, uncertainty and distrust prevail. The pronouncements of church leaders carry no special authority even among members, let alone in the nations at large.

  We are returned, willing or unwilling, to the most fundamental factor in law and order: even the most ruthless despot or dictator cannot rule without the at least passive complicity of his subjects. On the other face of law and order: no crime can be inhibited or punished unless there is a strong conviction that to commit it is sinful. To achieve a higher level of human interaction and concern, progress must be made on two fronts: one, in the enforcement of law by reliable stewards of public power; two, through deepening of individual and group awareness of the earnest nature of the choice between good and evil, between innocence and guilt.

  HUBERT G. LOCKE

  Silence hangs like a pall over this wrenching experience that you have shared with us, Mr. Wiesenthal. When the dying Nazi turns to you and tries to
beg forgiveness, you remain silent. At that moment, you tell us, “there was an uncanny silence in the room.” Later, when you visit his mother, you stand before his portrait in silence and finally you leave the old woman without having answered her entreaties. By remaining silent, you kept the truth about a son from his mother—in your words “without diminishing…the poor woman's last surviving consolation—faith in the goodness of her son.” You gave, on one hand, silent assent to a dying man's truth about himself and, on the other, you kept the truth, by silence, about a son from his mother. In your silence, both revelation and concealment are manifest; is it possible that you said more in your silence than if you had spoken?

  You ask if your silence to the dying Nazi's pleas for forgiveness was right or wrong. You wonder if it was a mistake not to have told his mother the truth. You also ask those of us who read your account, if we had been in your place, what we would have done. Only those who are certain of their answer to your final query can have the arrogance to pose answers to the first two. Silence, in fact, may be the better response—our silence to yours—in the hope that by listening quietly and more closely to your experience, we might learn from it, rather than moralize about it.

  Why is it, in fact, that we mortals are so averse to silence, that we feel we must greet each experience with dissection, discussion, and analysis, that to speak is to know? There is, to be sure, the conviction that we gain understanding by rational effort, that by asking questions and weighing evidence and considering alternatives and demanding proofs and debating various positions and interpretations, we somehow arrive at the “right” answers to life's mysteries. Much of our much-touted human progress has been achieved because we are so wedded to such efforts—but then we come up against an experience such as you have placed before us and our response—my response, at least—is to shudder. I find myself unable to ask the probing questions of morals and ethics regarding your situation; instead, I am conscious of a cold chill that comes over me when I sense what it may have been like to be in your or a similar circumstance. No, I cannot answer your question of right and wrong; your silence was your answer and perhaps it should be ours as well.

  There is much that silence might teach us, if we could but learn to listen to it. Not the least of its lessons is that there may well be questions for which there are no answers and other questions for which answers would remove the moral force of the question. There are matters that perhaps should always remain unanswered; questions which should lie like a great weight on our consciences so that we continually feel an obligation to confront their insistent urging. There are questions that are unanswerable queries of the soul, matters too awe-full for human response, too demonic for profound rational resolution. By our silence, perhaps we acknowledge as much; we own up to our humanness. We concede that we are not gods and that we lack, as much as we might be loath to admit it, the capacity to provide understanding and assurance for every inexplicable moment in life.

  Perhaps we should be reluctant to answer your questions for another reason as well. The Latin verb “to answer,” which is reflected in the English word “response,” carries with it the meaning of “to assure” or “to promise or vow” or “to engage oneself.” It suggests that there is much more here than a mere intellectual exercise which you have given us. It implies that if we think we have answers or an answer, we are also offering assurances that what we propose will somehow satisfy the moral dilemma. It also suggests that we who answer also are prepared to engage ourselves in validating the accuracy (dare one say, the truth) of our response. An answer involves our willingness to attest to or affirm, by our personal involvement and commitment, the genuineness of our assertion. I dare not answer unless I am also ready to act; that is reason enough for pause.

  Your experience was part and parcel of a moment in history, as it is often observed, when even God was silent! I am struck most by your recounting your conversation with Arthur who tells you of the old woman in the Ghetto. When asked for news of when you and your comrades might get out of the camp or when you might be slaughtered, she says in effect, there is no news, for God is on leave. Perhaps there was a moment—one which you and millions of others experienced—which was so beyond the pale of comprehension that even God was silent. If God was silent, dare any of us speak?

  ERICH H. LOEWY

  Anyone who has never been in such an almost inconceivable situation like Simon Wiesenthal's cannot judge the events related in The Sunflower. Any judgment we would offer about such a situation is truly a form of hubris. I was personally lucky to escape from the Nazis in 1938. While what I experienced was, to put it mildly, distinctly unpleasant, it cannot compare to what those underwent who were—due to the Nazis but also to the policies of the western states and of the churches—locked in. My comments, therefore, are not a way of judging a situation which is entirely beyond being judged by normal standards but rather a way of examining some more common ethical problems.

  The relationship we are confronted with here is not simply one between strong aggressor and supine victim; nor is it a relationship of former victim to former aggressor with strength and weakness of each having, so to speak, changed places. The existential situation is one in which the context is unchanged: Wiesenthal continues to be a prisoner, the victim of rapacious forces which surround him. But in the particular context in which Wiesenthal experienced this story—in the sickroom of the wounded SS man—the situation is, for the moment, changed: it is the aggressor who, in a significant sense, is now the weaker, psychologically dependent upon his former victim and, in a sense, pleading with him. But he is pleading in a strange context: at any moment the SS man, although in one sense weakened, can call upon overwhelming forces which could and would crush Wiesenthal. Thus, for Wiesenthal, not doing what the weaker SS man wants still carries an inevitably grave risk. The relationship is extremely complex and the strengths and weaknesses of the actors, in the situation with which we are presented, may shift at any time.

  Not enough has, I think, been made of Wiesenthal's behavior during the time that the SS man “confessed”: evidently a matter of hours and agonizing hours for both. Too much has been made of the final question of forgiving or of not forgiving. What matters here, and what deserves more attention, is the basic humanity of the situation: a blind, fatally wounded aggressor pleads with one of his (potential) victims and that victim, let's face it, feels sorry for him. His compassion—incredible under the circumstances when one thinks where Wiesenthal is coming from and inevitably going back to—is aroused and he can in a sense place himself in the shoes of another suffering being, even of one who has brought unimaginable harm to persons just like Wiesenthal. He touches the man (the very thought makes my blood curdle), he chases away a fly which bothers the SS man, and he stays. By his behavior Wiesenthal tacitly admits the SS man back into a human company from which such a person must, when the truth strikes, feel himself permanently excluded. That is a form of acceptance, of acceptance of common humanity if not forgiveness or even understanding. One wonders if, rather than empty words of forgiveness, such human acceptance was not far more what the SS man truly wanted and hoped for. Showing the SS man that despite all that he had done he remained in Wiesenthal's eyes and heart, at any rate, a human being, is something Wiesenthal could, and did, do. The fact that he could do it, the fact that he sat by the bed, touched the SS man, and chased away a fly shows, I think, the measure of the man. It is, I think, the most important element in this story and perhaps the one which, when all is said and done, brought more comfort to the SS man than he could have hoped for or, in a strictly rational sense, deserved.

  Of course, Wiesenthal could not forgive the SS man: no one can forgive others something that has not been done to them directly. Nor is it, I think, Wiesenthal's role to point out the possibility of forgiveness by God. Wiesenthal is neither a priest nor a rabbi and pointing out that God might have mercy under these circumstances may easily irritate rather than comfort. The SS man chose not to
confess to a priest, although he is Catholic, or to receive absolution. He chose to speak to a victim and to seek human forgiveness from someone who represented for him those he had hurt. God or Divine forgiveness is altogether another matter. Ignoring such a request is all that Wiesenthal could do.

  The question of Simon Wiesenthal's relationship with the mother likewise bears examination. Obviously Wiesenthal was motivated by a deep concern for the truthfulness or falseness of what he had been told by the SS man about his previous life as well as by compassion for a severely damaged and bereaved mother. Soon after the war Wiesenthal subjects himself to an arduous journey (how arduous only those who are familiar with conditions in postwar Germany can understand) and finds a widow in a cold, bombed-out, and devastated building. He sees that she has her only son's picture on the wall, an only son whose story of his previous life at home she corroborates: he joined the SS, and since he became a Nazi had been totally estranged from his father; despite this, according to the mother, he had always been a good boy who would never harm anyone. When asked, Wiesenthal lies: he never met her son personally and only received his name through the window of a transport of wounded soldiers. Some have said that lying to the mother was wrong: had she known the truth, she could have come to terms with it, could have received solace from the Church and been reassured of Divine forgiveness. I cannot agree with this: she may very well not have been religious or even if she was religious such solace may not have been meaningful to her. Just as cogent would be the argument that knowing about her son could drive her to final despair and, perhaps, to suicide. Wiesenthal chose, humanely and I think wisely, to hide the truth.