The Sunflower
Page 26
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SIMON WIESENTHAL was born in 1908 in Buczacz, Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A recent graduate of the Czech Technical University in Prague and the Polytechnic Institute in Lvov, he had just begun to work in an architectural office in Lvov when Poland was invaded by the Nazis. From 1941 to 1945, Mr. Wiesenthal was a prisoner in several ghettos and concentration camps, including Buchenwald and Mauthausen. By the war's end, he and his wife had lost eighty-nine family members to the Nazi murderers.
After the war, Mr. Wiesenthal joined the American Commission for War Crimes and was later transferred to the O.S.S. at Linz. In 1946, with thirty other concentration camp survivors, he founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Center, which functioned in the American Zone until 1954, and reopened in Vienna in 1961. Its task is to identify and locate Nazi war criminals. The center's work was instrumental in bringing over 1,100 Nazi criminals to justice.
Mr. Wiesenthal received many awards for his work, including “Commander of the Order of Orange” in the Netherlands, “Commendatore della Repübblica” in Italy, a gold medal for humanitarian work by the United States Congress, the Jerusalem Medal in Israel, and sixteen honorary doctorates. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which has branches in New York, Miami, Toronto, and abroad, is named in his honor. Among his best-known books are The Murderers Among Us; Justice, Not Vengeance; Sails of Hope; and Every Day Remembrance Day. Mr. Wiesenthal died in 2005, at the age of 96.
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Introduction by Robert McAfee Brown
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Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free:
1-800-733-3000 (credit cards only).
Copyright © 1969, 1970 by Opera Mundi Paris
Copyright renewed © 1997 by Simon Wiesenthal
Preface and Symposium copyright © 1976, 1997, 1998 by Schocken Books Inc.
All rights reserved under international and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
SCHOCKEN and colophon are trademarks of Schocken Books Inc.
Mr. Wiesenthal's text was translated from the German by H.A. Pichler.
Symposium contributions by Jean Améry, Cardinal Franz König, and Albert Speer
were translated from the German by Barbara Harshav and Marianne M. Friedrich.
Smail Balić's contribution was translated from the German by Shelley Frisch.
Dorothee Soelle's contribution was translated from the German by Victoria Barnett.
Tzvetan Todorov's contribution was translated from the French by Barbara Harshav.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wiesenthal, Simon.
[Sonnenblume. English]
The sunflower: on the possibilities and limits of forgivenes / Simon Wiesenthal;
edited by Harry James Cargas and Bonny V. Fetterman.—Rev. and expanded ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-56042-1
1. Wiesenthal, Simon. 2. Wiesenthal, Simon. Sonnenblume.
3. World War, 1939–1945—Personal narratives, Jewish. 4. World War,
1939–1945—Concentration camps. 5. Forgiveness. I. Cargas, Harry J.
II. Title.
D 810.J 4W 5313 1997 179.7—dc 21 96– 36831
Random House Web Address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
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