The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

by Simon Wiesenthal

  “His words made me indignant. I wanted to go back and argue with him. I wanted to tell him that he simply did not understand modern times. But I let it be, so as not to make my departure worse for all of us by an ugly scene.

  “Those words were the last I ever heard my father speak…Occasionally he would add a few lines to my mother's letter but my mother usually made excuses by saying he was not back from work and she was anxious to catch the post.”

  He paused, and groped with his hand for the glass on the night table. Although he could not see it he knew where it was. He drank a mouthful of water and put the glass back safely in its place before I could do it for him. Was he really in such a bad way as he had said?

  “We were first sent to a training camp at an army base where we listened feverishly to the radio messages about the Polish campaign. We devoured the reports in the newspapers and dreaded that our services might not after all be needed. I was longing for experience, to see the world, to be able to recount my adventures…My uncle had had such exciting tales to tell of the war in Russia, how they had driven Ivan into the Masurian Lakes. I wanted to play my part in that sort of thing…”

  I sat there like a cat on hot bricks and tried to release my hand from his. I wanted to go away, but he seemed to be trying to talk to me with his hands as well as his voice. His grip grew tighter…as if pleading with me not to desert him. Perhaps his hand was a replacement for his eyes.

  I looked around the room and glancing at the window, I saw a part of the sun-drenched courtyard, with the shadow of the roof crossing it obliquely—a boundary between light and dark, a defined boundary without any transition.

  Then the dying man told of his time in occupied Poland, mentioning a place. Was it Reichshof? I didn't ask.

  Why the long prelude? Why didn't he say what he wanted from me? There was no necessity to break it so gently.

  Now his hand began to tremble and I took the opportunity to withdraw mine, but he clutched it again and whispered: “Please.” Did he want to fortify himself—or me?—for what was to come?

  “And then—then came the terrible thing…But first I must tell you a little more about myself.”

  He seemed to detect my uneasiness. Had he noticed I was watching the door, for suddenly he said:

  “No one will come in. The nurse promised to keep watch out there…

  “Heinz, my schoolmate, who was with me in Poland too, always called me a dreamer. I didn't really know why, perhaps because I was always merry and happy—at least until that day came and it happened…It's a good thing that Heinz cannot hear me now. My mother must never know what I did. She must not lose her image of a good son. That is what she always called me. She must always see me as she wanted to see me.

  “She used to read my letters out to all the neighbors…and the neighbors said that they were proud I got my wound fighting for the Führer and the Fatherland…you know the usual phrase…”

  His voice grew bitter as if he wanted to hurt himself, give himself pain.

  “In my mother's memory I am still a happy boy without a care in the world…Full of high spirits. Oh, the jokes we used to play…”

  As he recalled his youth and comrades, I too thought back on the years when practical jokes were a hobby of mine. I thought of my old friends…my schoolmates in Prague. We had had many a joke together, we who were young with life stretching before us.

  But what had my youth in common with his? Were we not from different worlds? Where were the friends from my world? Still in camp or already in a nameless mass grave…And where are his friends? They are alive, or at least they have a sunflower on their graves and a cross with their name on it.

  And now I began to ask myself why a Jew must listen to the confession of a dying Nazi soldier. If he had really rediscovered his faith in Christianity, then a priest should have been sent for, a priest who could help him die in peace. If I were dying to whom should I make my confession if indeed I had anything to confess? And anyway I would not have as much time as this man had. My end would be violent, as had happened to millions before me. Perhaps it would be an unexpected surprise, perhaps I would have no time to prepare for the bullet. He was still talking about his youth as if he were reading aloud and the only effect was that it made me think of my youth too. But it was so far away that it seemed unreal. It seemed as if I had always been in prison camps, as though I were born merely to be maltreated by beasts in human shape who wanted to work off their frustrations and racial hatreds on defenseless victims. Remembrance of time past only made me feel weak, and I badly needed to remain strong, for only the strong in these dire times had a hope of survival. I still clung to the belief that the world one day would revenge itself on these brutes—in spite of their victories, their jubilation at the battles they had won, and their boundless arrogance. The day would surely come when the Nazis would hang their heads as the Jews did now…

  All my instincts were against continuing to listen to this deathbed disavowal. I wanted to get away. The dying man must have felt this, for he dropped the letter and groped for my arm. The movement was so pathetically helpless that all of a sudden I felt sorry for him. I would stay, although I wanted to go. Quietly he continued talking.

  “Last spring we saw that something was afoot. We were told time after time we must be prepared for great doings. Each of us must show himself a man…He must be tough. There was no place for humanitarian nonsense. The Führer needed real men. That made a great impression on us at the time.

  “When the war with Russia began, we listened over the radio to a speech by Himmler before we marched out. He spoke of the final victory of the Führer's mission…On smoking out subhumans…We were given piles of literature about the Jews and the Bolsheviks, we devoured the ‘Sturmer,’ and many cut caricatures from it and pinned them above our beds. But that was not the sort of thing I cared for…In the evenings, in the canteen we grew heated with beer and talk about Germany's future. As in Poland, the war with Russia would be a lightning campaign, thanks to the genius of our leader. Our frontiers would be pushed further and further eastward. The German people needed room to live.”

  For a moment he stopped as though exhausted.

  “You can see for yourself on what sort of career my life was launched.”

  He was sorry for himself. His words were bitter and resigned.

  I again looked through the window and perceived that the boundary between light and shadow was now above the other windows of the inner façade. The sun had climbed higher. One of the windows caught the sun's rays and reflected them as it was closed again. For a moment the flash of light looked like a heliographic signal. At that time we were ready to see symbols in everything. It was a time rife for mysticism and superstition. Often my fellow prisoners in the camp told ghost stories. Everything for us was unreal and insubstantial: the earth was peopled with mystical shapes; God was on leave, and in His absence others had taken over, to give us signs and hints. In normal times we would have laughed at anybody who believed in supernatural powers. But nowadays we expected them to intervene in the course of events. We devoured every word spoken by alleged soothsayers and fortune-tellers. We often clung to completely nonsensical interpretations if only they gave us a ray of hope for better times. The eternal optimism of the Jew surpassed all reason, but now even reason was out of place. What in this Nazi world was reasonable and logical? You lost yourself in fantasy merely in order to escape from the appalling truth. And in such circumstances reason would have been a barrier. We escaped into dreams and we didn't want to awake from those dreams.

  I forgot for a moment where I was and then I heard a buzzing sound. A bluebottle, probably attracted by the smell, flew round the head of the dying man, who could not see it nor could he see me wave it away.

  “Thanks,” he nevertheless whispered. And for the first time I realized that I, a defenseless subhuman, had contrived to lighten the lot of an equally defenseless superman, without thinking, simply as a matter of course.
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br />   The narration proceeded: “At the end of June we joined a unit of storm troops and were taken to the front in trucks. We drove past vast fields of wheat which stretched as far as the eye could see. Our platoon leader said that Hitler had intentionally started the campaign against Russia at a time which would enable us to bring in the harvest. We thought that clever. On our endless journey we saw by the wayside dead Russians, burnt-out tanks, broken-down trucks, dead horses. And there were wounded Russians too, lying there helpless, with nobody to care for them; all the way we could hear their screams and groans.

  “One of my comrades spat at them and I protested. He simply replied with a phrase that our officer had used: ‘No pity for Ivan…’

  “His words sounded like a sober military command. He spoke in the style of a war correspondent. His words were parrotlike, unthinking. His conversation was full of stupid phrases which he had taken from newspapers.

  “Finally we came to a Ukrainian village and here I had my first contact with the enemy. We shot up a deserted farmhouse in which Russians had barricaded themselves. When we stormed in we found only a few wounded men lying about with whom we did not bother. That is, I did not bother. But our platoon leader…gave them the coup de grâce…

  “Since I have been in hospital here these details constantly recur to me. I live it all over again, but much more precisely and vividly…Now I have plenty of time.

  “The fighting was inhuman. Many of us could hardly stand it. When our major saw this he shouted at us: ‘Believe you me, do you think the Russians act differently toward our men? You need only see how they treat their own people. The prisons we come across are full of murdered men. They simply mow down their prisoners when they cannot take them away. He who has been selected to make history cannot be bothered with such trifles.’

  “One evening a comrade took me aside in order to express his horror, but after the very first sentence he stopped. He did not trust me.

  “We continued to make history. Day after day we heard victory reports and constantly we were told that the war would soon be over. Hitler said so and Himmler…For me it is now really over…”

  He took a deep breath. Then a sip of water. Behind me I heard a noise and looked around. I had not noticed that the door was open. But he had heard it.

  “Sister, please…”

  “All right, I only wanted to look round…”

  She shut the door again.

  “One hot summer day we came to Dnepropetrovsk. Everywhere there were abandoned cars and guns. Many of them still intact. Obviously the Russians had left in great haste. Houses were burning and the streets were blocked by hastily erected barricades, but there was nobody left to defend them. There were deaths among the civilians. On the pavement I saw the body of a woman and over her crouched two weeping children…

  “When the order came to fall out we leaned our rifles against the house walls, sat down, and smoked. Suddenly we heard an explosion and looked up, but there was no plane in sight. Then we saw a whole block of houses had blown up.

  “Many house blocks had been mined by the Russians before they retreated and as soon as our troops entered, the buildings blew up. One comrade declared that the Russians had learned such tactics from the Finns. I was glad we had been resting. We had escaped again.

  “Suddenly a staff car stopped near us. A major climbed out and sent for our captain. Then came a number of trucks which took us to another part of the town. There the same miserable picture presented itself.

  “In a large square we got out and looked around us. On the other side of the square there was a group of people under close guard. I assumed they were civilians who were to be taken out of the town, in which fighting was still going on. And then the word ran through our group like wildfire: ‘They're Jews’…In my young life I had never seen many Jews. No doubt there had formerly been some, but for the most part they had emigrated when Hitler came to power. The few who remained simply disappeared later. It was said they had been sent to the Ghetto. Then they were forgotten. My mother sometimes mentioned our family doctor, who was a Jew and for whom she mourned deeply. She carefully preserved all his prescriptions, for she had complete trust in his medical knowledge. But one day the chemist told her that she must get her medicines prescribed by a different doctor, he was not allowed to make up the prescriptions of a Jewish doctor. My mother was furious but my father just looked at me and held his tongue.

  “I need not tell you what the newspapers said about the Jews. Later in Poland I saw Jews who were quite different from ours in Stuttgart. At the army base at Debicka some Jews were still working and I often gave them something to eat. But I stopped when the platoon leader caught me doing it. The Jews had to clean out our quarters and I often deliberately left behind on the table some food which I knew they would find.

  “Otherwise all I knew about the Jews was what came out of the loudspeaker or what was given us to read. We were told they were the cause of all our misfortunes…They were trying to get on top of us, they were the cause of war, poverty, hunger, unemployment…”

  I noticed that the dying man had a warm undertone in his voice as he spoke about the Jews. I had never heard such a tone in the voice of an SS man. Was he better than the others—or did the voices of SS men change when they were dying?

  “An order was given,” he continued, “and we marched toward the huddled mass of Jews. There were a hundred and fifty of them or perhaps two hundred, including many children who stared at us with anxious eyes. A few were quietly crying. There were infants in their mothers’ arms, but hardly any young men; mostly women and graybeards.

  “As we approached I could see the expression in their eyes—fear, indescribable fear…apparently they knew what was awaiting them…

  “A truck arrived with cans of petrol which we unloaded and took into a house. The strong men among the Jews were ordered to carry the cans to the upper stories. They obeyed—apathetically, without a will of their own, like automatons.

  “Then we began to drive the Jews into the house. A sergeant with a whip in his hand helped any of the Jews who were not quick enough. There was a hail of curses and kicks. The house was not very large, it had only three stories. I would not have believed it possible to crowd them all into it. But after a few minutes there was no Jew left on the street.”

  He was silent and my heart started to beat violently. I could well imagine the scene. It was all too familiar. I might have been among those who were forced into that house with the petrol cans. I could feel how they must have pressed against each other; I could hear their frantic cries as they realized what was to be done to them.

  The dying Nazi went on: “Then another truck came up full of more Jews and they too were crammed into the house with the others. Then the door was locked and a machine gun was posted opposite.”

  I knew how this story would end. My own country had been occupied by the Germans for over a year and we had heard of similar happenings in Bialystok, Brody, and Gródek. The method was always the same. He could spare me the rest of his gruesome account.

  So I stood up ready to leave but he pleaded with me: “Please stay. I must tell you the rest.”

  I really do not know what kept me. But there was something in his voice that prevented me from obeying my instinct to end the interview. Perhaps I wanted to hear from his own mouth, in his own words, the full horror of the Nazis’ inhumanity.

  “When we were told that everything was ready, we went back a few yards, and then received the command to remove safety pins from hand grenades and throw them through the windows of the house. Detonations followed one after another…My God!”

  Now he was silent, and he raised himself slightly from the bed: his whole body was shivering.

  But he continued: “We heard screams and saw the flames eat their way from floor to floor…We had our rifles ready to shoot down anyone who tried to escape from that blazing hell…

  “The screams from the house were horrible. Dense smoke poured ou
t and choked us…”

  His hand felt damp. He was so shattered by his recollection that he broke into a sweat and I loosened my hand from his grip. But at once he groped for it again and held it tight.

  “Please, please,” he stammered, “don't go away, I have more to say.”

  I no longer had any doubts as to the ending. I saw that he was summoning his strength for one last effort to tell me the rest of the story to its bitter end.

  “…Behind the windows of the second floor, I saw a man with a small child in his arms. His clothes were alight. By his side stood a woman, doubtless the mother of the child. With his free hand the man covered the child's eyes…then he jumped into the street. Seconds later the mother followed. Then from the other windows fell burning bodies…We shot…Oh God!”

  The dying man held his hand in front of his bandaged eyes as if he wanted to banish the picture from his mind.

  “I don't know how many tried to jump out of the windows but that one family I shall never forget—least of all the child. It had black hair and dark eyes…”

  He fell silent, completely exhausted.

  The child with the dark eyes he had described reminded me of Eli, a boy from the Lemberg Ghetto, six years old with large, questioning eyes—eyes that could not understand—accusing eyes—eyes that one never forgets.

  The children in the Ghetto grew up quickly, they seemed to realize how short their existence would be. For them days were months, and months were years. When I saw them with toys in their hands, they looked unfamiliar, uncanny, like old men playing with childish things.

  When had I first seen Eli? When did I talk to him for the first time? I could not remember. He lived in a house near the Ghetto gate. Sometimes he wandered right up to the gate. On one occasion I heard a Jewish policeman talking to him and that is how I knew his name—Eli. It was rare that a child dared to approach the Ghetto gate. Eli knew that. He knew it from instinct without understanding why.