The Sunflower

by Simon Wiesenthal

  But the dying SS man has had twinges all along. He has, in fact, a moral temperament. He is intelligently contrite; he knows there is no way for him to atone, but he understands what atonement is, he understands the force of contrition. He is a man with a vigorous insight into his own moral nature. He is a man with a conscience.

  Should not some special recognition—some softening of condemnation—be given to the man of conscience? We condemn the brute; he is a barbarian; we condemn him as we condemn every barbarian. How then can we dare to condemn the man of conscience, as if there were no difference between him and the barbarian?

  We condemn the intelligent man of conscience because there is a difference;* because, though at heart not a savage, he allowed himself to become one, he did not resist. It was not that he lacked conscience; he smothered it. It was not that he lacked sensibility; he coarsened it. It was not that he lacked humanity; he deadened it.

  The brute runs to feed Moloch because to him Moloch is not a false god, but a Delightful True Lord, the Master who brings him exaltation. In exaltation he shovels in the babies. He has no conscience to stop him, no moral education, no moral insight. Perhaps he was never a server in his church. Does he even know what wickedness is?

  The intelligent man of conscience also shovels in the babies, and it does not matter that he does it without exaltation. Conscience, education, insight—nothing stops him. He goes on shoveling. He knows what wickedness is. By now he has been shoveling for so long that he knows what Moloch is, he is intimate with Moloch. He is a morally sensitive man, and he shovels babies to glut the iron stomach of the idol.

  The morally sensitive SS man goes on shoveling, and shoveling, and shoveling.

  A virtuous childhood as a server in his church lies behind him; he shovels. A virtuous future as a model of remorse lies ahead of him; he shovels. He shovels and shovels, all the while possessed of a refined and meticulous moral temperament—so refined and so meticulous that it knows the holy power of forgiveness, and knows to ask for it.

  I discover a quotation attributed to Hannah Arendt: “The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.” Jabberwocky at last. She is the greatest moral philosopher of the age, but even she cannot make a Lazarus of history.

  Graham Greene explains the Catholic idea of hell—no longer that medieval site of endless conflagration; instead, an eternal separation from God.

  Let the SS man die unshriven.

  Let him go to hell.

  Sooner the fly to God than he.

  For the root of this insight I am indebted to Professor Melvin L. Plotinsky of Indiana University.

  JOHN T. PAWLIKOWSKI

  To respond adequately to the questions raised by Simon Wiesenthal in The Sunflower may exceed human capacity. But we can begin to get some hold on them if we come to understand the significant difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. Unfortunately, in the popular mind, and perhaps in Wiesenthal's conception as well, the two notions easily become intertwined. While Wiesenthal refuses to speak the words of forgiveness the dying Nazi soldier wishes to hear, one has the sense that in his heart he has come close to such an act. His dialogue with the priest who was his fellow inmate, as well as his conversation with his camp partners Arthur, Adam, and Josek, coupled with his unwillingness to destroy the “good boy” image of her son held by the mother of the dead Nazi soldier leaves me with the impression that his public silence may not fully represent his innermost feeling.

  His willingness to forgive in a way at the inner level of his being was no doubt rooted in part in a remark he makes early on in the narrative where he reflects on the question “Were we truly all made of the same stuff?” (p. 7). While Wiesenthal leaves the answer rather ambiguous at that point, subsequently one is left with the impression that he recognizes a certain basic human equality as common both to “victim” and “perpetrator,” even if we must continue to condemn publicly the perpetrator's crime. And his willingness to acknowledge the dying soldier's “warm undertone in his voice as he spoke about the Jews” (p. 40) further confirms this perception.

  The public form of forgiveness is reconciliation. And this is of necessity a much longer, more complex process, especially in a case such as this where Wiesenthal is being asked to reconcile publicly with the Nazi soldier through word and gesture in the name of a community of victims. Reconciliation entails several stages: repentance, contrition, acceptance of responsibility, healing, and finally reunion. Clearly in the limited and confined circumstances in which Wiesenthal encountered the dying Nazi soldier reconciliation was an impossibility. The various stages cannot be traversed quickly. They require demonstrated changes that go beyond the merely verbal. The dying soldier, as I perceive him through Wiesenthal's description, was seeking not merely forgiveness in the more limited sense, but also a sense of reconciliation not only with Wiesenthal as an individual but through him with the Jewish people at large.

  In my judgment Wiesenthal was correct in withholding such reconciliation, for it would have provided the man with what theologian Paul Tillich referred to as “cheap grace.” That Wiesenthal might have said or done something to provide the dying man with a limited sense of personal forgiveness is certainly open to discussion, although the fact that the soldier seemed to regard Wiesenthal primarily as a “communal symbol” rather than a single human person complicates the matter considerably. If Wiesenthal had possessed a better grasp of the distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation, however, he might have found a way to offer the man some sense of forgiveness while making it clear that under the circumstances it was impossible to effect reconciliation with the Jewish victims as a whole. In so doing Wiesenthal may have alleviated that burden of uncertainty about the encounter with the dying soldier he appears to carry to the very end of the story. He would have responded positively to the sense of human bonding, despite the soldier's terrible crime, of which he seems keenly aware, while safeguarding against any premature feeling of reconciliation on the part of the soldier.

  Apart from the moral dilemma about forgiveness/reconciliation that permeates the entirety of The Sunflower, two other issues strike me as worthy of further reflection. The first relates to Arthur's reaction to the comment made on the radio by the anonymous woman who remarks that “God is on leave” (p. 8) when asked whether Divine intervention on behalf of the victims was conceivable. For Arthur this seems a somewhat liberating idea. Wiesenthal remarks that for the first time since he and his friends had come to the stable they were laughing. But he was not. His personal reaction to the woman's “theological” observation was a rather dismissive “Tell me when He gets back” (p. 8).

  In hindsight one can say that both Arthur and Simon were partially correct. Yes, the Holocaust was not to mark the end of all God-talk and God-belief. It was too easy to lay all the blame on God's failure to take the Divine covenantal responsibility with sufficient seriousness and stop the Nazis in their tracks. But, on the other hand, Wiesenthal's curt reply serves as a reminder that easy theodicy answers in terms of the Holocaust will not work any more than “cheap grace” will work in terms of reconciliation. The struggle to find a meaningful understanding of Divine presence is a far more wrenching process than either Arthur or Simon would seem to realize. As Elie Wiesel has poignantly shown in some of his writings many Holocaust victims, despite everything, could not in the end simply let God disappear from their lives. Yet, as Irving Greenberg and others have rightly observed, a deeper appreciation of God's role during the Holocaust, and afterward, will involve an understanding of a continual absence/presence relationship (“moment faith”) rather than a total leave of absence as the woman on the radio suggested. And it will include as well a major redefinition of human and Divine agency in the world. God's control and God's interventionist possibilities can no longer be envisioned in the same way as they were in biblical and classical versions of Judaism and Christianity.

  One has the sense after a reading of The Sunflowe
r that Wiesenthal's rather cryptic response to his friends’ discussion of the God-question in light of the woman's remark about God being on temporary leave in fact played a more significant role in his eventual encounter with the dying Nazi soldier than may appear to be the case at first glance. It may just be that Wiesenthal's inability to come to grips with the issue of Divine presence which he externally shrugs off but which may well have haunted him internally more than he reveals was in part the cause of his uncertain approach to the Nazi soldier. If he had personally not come near to resolving his own difficulty with God over the Holocaust, there was little possibility that he would have the inner strength to reach out to the dying Nazi in a genuinely merciful way without pretending to forgive him in the name of the Jewish people.

  My final words have to do with a painful subject—Polish/Jewish relations—raised in The Sunflower. But they must be spoken. Wiesenthal is quite aware in The Sunflower of the suffering, actual and potential, of the Polish nation that was part and parcel of the Nazi plan. He acknowledges, for example, that “the Poles and Ukrainians formed a special stratum between the self-appointed German supermen and the subhuman Jews, and already they were trembling at the thought of the day when there would be no Jews left” (p. 10). Nonetheless, his overall portrayal of Polish-Jewish relations may easily feed the stereotypical image of Poles and Poland as a hotbed of anti-semitism. He plays off the remark that “A wise man once said that the Jews were the salt of the earth,” adding that “…the Poles thought that their land had been ruined by over-salting. Compared with Jews in other countries, therefore, we were perhaps better prepared for what the Nazis had in store for us” (p. 70).

  Without question Polish society in the period between the two world wars was characterized by a pervasive antisemitism rooted in classical images of Jews and in more modern nationalistic theories. Certainly such antisemitism deserves repudiation as the Polish bishops have done in recent years. But there is another aspect to the Polish reality that one will not understand from reading The Sunflower. It is that of the Zegota movement, the only organization aimed at saving Jews during the Holocaust. There are the individual righteous, Christians and Socialists, whose number exceeds that of any other nation in Europe. There is also the story of the long, reasonably constructive presence of the Jews in Polish society. And finally there is the fact that Poland was home to Europe's largest Jewish community between the world wars, an extremely complex community ranging from the extreme Orthodox to Socialists and Marxists and Zionists. None of these “facts” in any way ameliorate the horror of Polish antisemitism, including Wiesenthal's obviously painful personal experiences chronicled in The Sunflower. But they are important in terms of an accurate overall picture of Polish-Jewish relations which has yet to be written.

  DENNIS PRAGER

  I am a religious Jew who has come to admire many Christians and to appreciate Christianity. I have come to see it as a holy path to God for non-Jews (this is not a small theological metamorphosis for a Jew raised in the Orthodox yeshiva world), and I deeply fear the consequences of a de-Christianized America. Yet, more than a decade of weekly dialogue with Christians and intimate conversations with Christian friends have convinced me that, aside from the divinity of Jesus, the greatest—and even more important—difference between Judaism and Christianity, or perhaps only between most Christians and Jews, is their different understanding of forgiveness and, ultimately, how to react to evil.

  When the first edition of The Sunflower was published, I was intrigued by the fact that all the Jewish respondents thought Simon Wiesenthal was right in not forgiving the repentant Nazi mass murderer and that the Christians thought he was wrong. I have come to understand that this is not because the Holocaust was particularly the Jews’ catastrophe, but rather because of the nature of the Jewish and Christian responses to evil, which are related to their differing understandings of forgiveness. I do not know which came first, the different Christian approach to forgiveness or the different Christian approach to evil.

  First, forgiveness. As Wiesenthal's fellow sufferers and as a number of Jewish respondents noted in the first edition, the relevant Jewish view of forgiveness is that a person who hurts another person must ask forgiveness from his victim and that only the victim can forgive him. God Himself does not forgive a person who has sinned against a human being unless that human being has been forgiven by his victim.

  Therefore, people can never forgive murder, since the one person who can forgive is gone, forever. Under circumstances of awesome contrition (which, I believe, must include the murderer giving up his life), God presumably can forgive a murderer, but as far as people are concerned, murder is unforgivable. Even parents cannot forgive the murderer of their child (to assume that parents can forgive their child's murderer is to render children property rather than autonomous human beings).

  This belief of Judaism that only victims can forgive and that murder is therefore unforgivable reinforces its belief that murder is the most terrible thing a human can do (though there are gradations of sin even in murder—for example, murder accompanied by torture is worse than other forms of murder). Murder undermines the very foundations of the world God created. That is why the third Commandment given by God to humanity after the Flood (the first two are to be fruitful and multiply and not to eat the limb of a living animal) is that “he who sheds blood shall have his blood be shed by man.” Not tolerating murder (and to the Torah, allowing all murderers to live is a form of murder-tolerance) is the moral foundation of civilization.

  Conversely, tolerance of murder is the characteristic of a world in decay. Yet, as I write this essay in the last decade of the twentieth century, my country, especially its elite, has come to tolerate murder. There is no other way to explain the fact that in the United States of America the average murderer serves but eleven years in prison. We not only forgive most murderers—when they leave prison, murderers are said to have “paid their debt to society”—we do so even if they are unrepentant. The best educated of Western society view murder as an unfortunate act of “antisocial” behavior and seek the rehabilitation of the murderer, not his punishment (let alone his death).

  Is this a function of a society deeply influenced by Christian notions of forgiving everyone? Or is it a society whose secular elite has rejected Judaism's and Christianity's notions of moral absolutes? Probably a combination of both.

  In The Killing of Bonnie Garland, a book as depressing in its way as The Sunflower is in its, psychiatrist Willard Gaylin describes the Catholic priests who took a murderer—a Hispanic Catholic college student who had bludgeoned his girlfriend to death—under their wing and did everything they could to ensure that he was not prosecuted. While I could well imagine a group of secular Jewish therapists or social workers engaging in such behavior, I cannot imagine any group of rabbis, even the most liberal, acting that way.

  Indeed, I tested my thesis in real life.

  As noted, for ten years I moderated a weekly radio show on which my guests were a Protestant minister, a Catholic priest, and a rabbi, different individuals each week. During that time, the notorious rape and beating of a woman jogger by a gang of young men in New York's Central Park took place. After their arrest, a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church visited the boys at prison to tell them only one thing: “God loves you.”

  I was so furious that I publicly noted then that someone ought to write an article “How to Get a Personal Visit from a Cardinal.” I thought of all the beautiful Catholics in New York, devoting their lives to the poor and the sick, who would give almost anything for a personal visit from a cardinal of their church. But the lucky recipients of such a visit were sadistic batterers and rapists who would have been murderers were it not for the wonders of modern medicine (they left the woman to bleed to death).

  On my show, I wondered aloud whether my fury at the cardinal (a good man, hence I omit his name) was a personal or a Jewish response. I assumed the latter since virtually all my Christian ca
llers agreed with the cardinal, and all my Jewish callers agreed with me. But I decided to test my thesis on the clergy. For four weeks, I asked the clergy what they would say to these torturers if they had met with them. Every Protestant and Catholic clergyman, liberal and conservative, essentially echoed the cardinal's words. All the rabbis, Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox, said that they would not meet with the youths, but if forced to, they would tell them of their disgust with them, that they should be severely punished and spend the rest of their lives seeking to redress their evil; and they certainly would not tell them that God loved them.

  The Christian view of forgiveness and, as exemplified in the case of the rapists, the Christian view of God's love—in a lifetime of Jewish study and teaching, I have never heard a Jew say that God loves an evil person—have led me to conclude that Christianity and Judaism, or perhaps only Christians and Jews, have differing views of evil and what to do about it. Another example is necessary.

  Under the totalitarian Soviet regime, both Soviet Jews and Soviet Christians were oppressed. Indeed, by the end of the Cold War, Soviet Christians were more oppressed than Soviet Jews. Thanks to worldwide Jewish efforts on behalf of Soviet Jews, by the 1980s no Soviet Jew was incarcerated for practicing Judaism, while quite a number of Soviet Christians were incarcerated for practicing Christianity. Why was there no outcry from the world's billion Christians while the thirteen million Jews of the world made Soviet Jewry a household word?

  I believe that there are four reasons: the Christian doctrine of forgiveness has blunted Christian anger at those who oppress them; the notion that one should pray for one's enemies has been taken to mean “pray for them, do not fight them”; the belief that God loves everyone, no matter how evil, makes it impossible for a believing Christian to hate evil people and therefore difficult to fight them (I assume those who love mass murderers are less likely to want them dead than those who hate them); and the Christian emphasis on saving souls for the afterlife has led to some de-emphasis on saving bodies in this life.