What would I have done in Simon's predicament? I would have—I do hope—forgiven him and, as an obstinate believer, suggested to him that he make his peace with God by asking for his forgiveness, and, taking full advantage of the situation, uttered a prayer for the repose of his soul and those of the victims of his inhuman behavior.
EVA FLEISCHNER
Simon Wiesenthal's story ends by inviting the reader to change places with him: “Ask yourself the crucial question, ‘what would I have done?’” I find it impossible to answer this question. As an outsider to the Shoah twice over—first, as one who was not there, secondly, as a non-Jew—neither the most vivid imagination nor the deepest empathy can enable me to experience even remotely the horror in the midst of which the victims lived and died. Nor can the skill with which Wiesenthal tells this highly dramatic story bridge the gap. I shall therefore, instead, give my reaction to Simon's response to the dying SS man's wish.
Some might call it lack of response, since Simon leaves the room in silence. But I find him responding throughout, again and again: allowing the SS man to hold on to his hand, remaining seated on the bed when revulsion—at times fear—make him want to leave, chasing away the fly from the dying man. Simon was forced to come, he had no choice. But he chose to remain and hear Karl out. And years later, when he visited Karl's mother in Stuttgart, he made the decision not to rob the lonely old woman of the fond memories of her “good” son. All this, in my view, constitutes a significant and humane response on his part.
And yet, after leaving the room, and many times over the years since then, Simon is haunted by the question whether he should have granted Karl's request and forgiven him. The question, for me, is not whether he should have forgiven, but whether he could have done so. Was it in his power to forgive?
Over the past twenty years I have frequently used The Sunflower as a text in my Holocaust course; it has invariably led to animated discussions. One striking feature of these has been that, almost without exception, the Christian students come out in favor of forgiveness, while the Jewish students feel that Simon did the right thing by not granting the dying man's wish.
What is going on here? Is there a fundamental difference between Jews and Christians in their approach to the question of forgiveness? And yet, forgiveness is no Christian invention. Along with so much else in our tradition we inherited from Judaism: the image of a loving, merciful God who waits eagerly and, as it were, with open arms, to welcome back the sinner (cf. Isa. 55:6–7; Joel 2:12–13; Ps. 130:7–8, etc.). These texts from biblical tradition—and they could be multiplied many times over—are reflected also in the teachings of the rabbis. To cite just one example:
A king had a son who had gone astray from him on a journey of a hundred days. His friends said to him, “Return to your father.” He said, “I cannot.” Then his father sent a message to him saying, “Return as far as you can and I will come the rest of the way to you.” In a similar way God says, “Return to me and I will return to you.”
(Pesikta Rabbati, 184b–85a, quoted in Harriet Kaufman, Judaism and Social Justice, p. 29)
Jesus’ well-known parable of the Prodigal Son stands squarely in this Jewish tradition. The only requirement for being forgiven by God is genuine repentance—teshuvah, metanoia. Such a “turning” is required by Christian as much as by Jewish tradition. Without repentance, no forgiveness.
If this is so, if both traditions believe in a merciful God, if both stress the need for repentance, why the difference in response among my students? I attribute it to two factors.
The first is what I believe to be a widespread misunderstanding among Christians of Jesus’ teaching of his oft-quoted admonition to his followers in the Sermon on the Mount to “turn the other cheek” (Matt. 5:39). Jesus is here referring to wrong done to me, and is asking me not to retaliate. He is not saying that, if someone wrongs me, someone else should “turn the other cheek”; or, if another is wronged, that I should forgive the perpetrator. In other words, the call is addressed to me, to forgive evil done to me. The message is the same in the Lord's Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” (not, “those who trespass against others”).
I believe that Christians—and non-Christians in their wake—have misread, and continue to misread, these texts, interpreting Jesus’ teaching to mean that we are to forgive anyone and everyone, whatever the wrong done to anyone. The element that is lost sight of is that Jesus challenges me to forgive evil done to me (in itself quite enough of a challenge!). Nowhere does he tell us to forgive the wrong done to another. Yet, the widespread impression persists among Christians that, to be truly Christian, we must forgive, plain and simple, no matter who has been sinned against.
Applying this to Wiesenthal's story: Karl asks Simon to forgive him for the horrendous murder of innocent and helpless Jewish women, children, and men in which he, Karl, participated two years earlier, and the memory of which now tortures him so much that he cannot die in peace. But, I ask again, was it possible for Simon to grant Karl's request? And I answer quite emphatically, no. Only the victims were in a position to forgive; and they are dead, put to death in the most inhuman ways conceivable.
The second factor which may account for the difference in attitude among my students relates to the concept of atonement, or restitution. As I write these lines we are approaching Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Long ago I learned from Jewish friends that one of the most important ways of preparing for Yom Kippur is to look back over the past year, ask forgiveness of anyone you have wronged, and make up for it in some way. Only then, Jews believe, may they come before God and hope for forgiveness. For, as the Mishnah says,
For sins against God, the Day of Atonement brings forgiveness. For sins against one's neighbor, the Day of Atonement brings no forgiveness until one has become reconciled with one's neighbor.
(Yoma 8:9, Mishnah, quoted in Harriet Kaufman's Judaism and Social Justice, p. 30)
I remember one friend writing forty letters between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to people she felt she had hurt in some way. This is a long way from the “penance” usually given to Catholics in the confessional, “Say an Our Father or Hail Mary”—though the origin of this custom may well have been the idea of atonement, of which hardly a vestige is left nowadays.
Again, coming back to our story: Karl cannot atone for his crime, since the victims are dead. And Simon cannot forgive Karl in their name. It is helpful here to read Abraham Heschel's response (see pp. 170–71).
One concluding thought. Simon could perhaps have told Karl: “There is no way I can forgive you, since I cannot, dare not, speak in the name of the murdered Jews. But the God you believe in, and I too, is infinitely merciful, and asks of us only to repent of our sins. If your repentance is genuine, and I believe it is, and since you cannot make restitution, throw yourself on God's mercy.”
But is not this asking a great deal—too much even—of Simon, given his situation? A situation of utter powerlessness and constant terror, totally devoid of hope, with death hanging over him every moment? Indeed, as I reread the story once more I am struck not only by the agony of the dying man, but by his obliviousness to the suffering, the inhuman condition, of Simon and his fellow Jews. The mere fact of having summoned Simon to his room exposes the Jew to punishment, if not death. Yet Karl insists on seeing “a Jew”—any Jew—in the hope of being able to die in peace. His own suffering completely blinds him to the suffering of the Jews—not of the Jews in whose murder he participated and who continue to haunt him—but of those still alive in the camps and ghettos, also of Simon.
While this is understandable, humanly, given his deathbed agony, I am left with the question: Could Karl have done something to ameliorate their fate, or the fate of at least a few Jews, by speaking to his fellow SS instead of summoning a poor, helpless, doomed Jew to his bedside? Would such an act perhaps have constituted atonement?
MATTHEW FOX
Si
mon Wiesenthal is a truth-teller who shakes up our conscience. Like many rabbis of old, including Jesus, he does not tell us so much about right from wrong; rather, he puts us in a place where our conscience must make decisions. We thank him for this. But we also curse him—for his challenge is very difficult. What would we have done—what should we have done—were we in his unenviable position in the hospital with a dying SS man?
Let us remember his circumstances. Simon did not know if he himself was going to live through the day; or the week; or the month. (In fact, most of his friends did not survive the camps and eighty-nine close relatives perished.) And still this one young SS man, in a kind of command performance, summoned a Jew to confess to. He wanted Simon to somehow relieve him of his guilt. We have to remember that the sin that so shook up Karl the SS man, his observing and participating in the slaughter of innocents in a torched house, was not his only sin. It was the nightmare that kept him awake at night, but it was by no means his only sin. Long before that fateful night, this SS man had participated time and time again in the mass hysteria and racial hatred that spawned the death camps and the war and many other deaths of innocents even before the deaths in Dnepropetrovsk. He did not express repentance for one-can-only-guess-how-many acts of hatred and sadism and antisemitism he committed on other occasions as an SS man—only for the one gruesome occasion which interfered with his sleep.
This young man as an enthusiastic Nazi had participated in, among other things, the death of eighty-nine of Simon's relatives. Indeed, he was partially responsible for the very camp where Wiesenthal was facing death daily. And so the confession that he made on his deathbed to Simon Wiesenthal was only partial. It was far from the full story.
When a Catholic confesses his sins, and this SS man was a lapsed Catholic, he not only is to tell the whole story but also to undergo penance to demonstrate his sorrow and contrition. It seems to me that in this regard Simon acted as the ideal confessor. He gave Karl the only penance available to him to bestow: Silence. The penance of Karl's having to be alone with his conscience before he died. Simon did not offer him forgiveness as a Jew—how could he forgive in the name of even one in that home of hundreds who were torched or the millions in camps of death? But Simon, summoned as a priest-confessor, let the man speak his heart. Some sins are too big for forgiveness, even for priests. Public penance is required. This man received no public penance but his private penance was considerable, having to die in the silence of the truth staring him in the face. I sense in the wisdom of Simon's decision to walk out in silence a win-win situation. Simon kept his soul and the young soldier may have saved his soul. He did unburden his soul to the best person possible—not a priest offering cheap grace for unmentionable sins, but a relative of his dead victims.
Call it tough love or call it nonsentimental compassion. But Simon offered Karl a morally responsible and adult response. Silence. Be with your sin. Be in the dark in the Via Negativa where so many of your victims and relatives of your victims lie. Be with your conscience. Be with your victims. Be with your God. I get the impression that Karl appreciated the strength of Simon's response and that is why he gave his last human holdings, meagre as they were, to Simon as a thank-you gift. But Simon, again wisely, refused to touch them.
But Simon did take the man's hand and hold it. And he did swat away flies that bothered the dying but guilt-ridden soldier. By holding his hand Simon was being present and being human. Though holding his hand repulsed him after more of the horror story was revealed, still he stayed in the room and listened. Listening was his gift; listening was his act of compassion. This unusual bond between young men—one a killer and another a hunted one for no reason but his race—this touching of hands and stories and hearts: such a rite of passage for a culture lacking authentic rites of passage for its young. Both were victims of older men's decision making. But one was a perpetrator of that older man's sick vision and the other was at the receiving end of it. This was Simon's compassion, to stay and listen and even to remain silent and refuse to offer cheap forgiveness to so heinous a crime. There are sins that God and not humans must forgive. And no one had anointed Simon to forgive in God's name.
Some kind of mysterious grace seems to have passed between these two young men. Indeed, I wonder if Simon did not receive his vocation from this dying SS man. Why do I say that? Because in many ways Wiesenthal's life commitment since surviving the death camp can be understood as a playing out of the scene so powerfully described at the hospital bed. Simon has continued to hunt down Nazis in order, one might believe, to allow them a deathbed conversion, a deathbed confession. Without his hunting these sinners down neither they nor their victims will rest in the next life. Without this remembering, justice dies. Simon was just to the SS man and more than just—he was compassionate. And his whole life commitment since has been a pursuit of justice and therefore of compassion. For there is no compassion without justice. Simon does not condemn the criminals he uncovers; he leaves that up to the judges of the courts. He only provides the witnesses, the testimony, the evidence. They convict themselves. As did Karl.
And in this vocation to tell the truth Simon carries on a lesson that Karl left him. It is a strange exchange, a strange bond between these two men. It is moving to behold. Simon gave Karl a listening ear on his deathbed; and Karl gave Simon a vocation for a lifetime.
Another act of compassion on Simon's part was his visiting Karl's mother and doing so without a preconceived agenda. There he made more bonding with Karl—seeing his face for the first time in a photograph and feeling the pain in his broken family's story. His letting Karl's mother continue in her denial and in her belief that her son was innocent was an act that carries one beyond justice to compassion as well. He intuited that it would do this broken widow no good to tell her the truth. It was too late for that.
Yet it was this clinging to denial that surely constituted the sin behind the sin of the Nazi horrors. How many ordinary German citizens—and clergy and bishops—knew something evil was going on and still lived in denial? Willful ignorance is a sin. In this case, a catastrophic sin that made the Holocaust possible. Simon treated mother and son the same—he listened to both and left both in silence. Each to die with their truth, partial that it was. But Simon's work since has been to break the silence, to keep alive the fuller truth of what transpired. And in doing this he has continued his acts of compassion on an international scale.
I believe this story disturbs us so deeply because, like any true morality story, it applies to today as much as to yesterday. Human capacity for evil is not just about isolated, individual decisions and acts. This story—the entire Nazi story—lays bare the sins of complicity and the sins of omission and denial that render our participation in evil so profound. These sins occur so readily in mass society when lies and power can be so easily disseminated by propaganda of the press and politicians and commercial interests. Denial allows these sins to take root and prosper—consider Karl's mother. This is happening still today. Sins of complicity are killing the planet and laying waste the souls of many young people as we live in denial of the prisons we are building to house young persons whose violence stems from despair and joblessness and as we lay waste forests and waters and soil and the air itself by our lifestyles of consumption. How different is our denial from that of Karl's mother? What evil is happening all around us and in our name? Is denial more important to us than the truth? These are questions—perennial moral questions—that Simon's story unveils for us.
Forgiving and forgetting are two separate acts. One should forgive—not out of altruism but out of the need to be free to get on with one's life—but we ought not forget. Simon did not forget—therefore he has gifted us with the greatest of gifts—a lifetime dedicated to justice and compassion. A god-like life. His story prevents our forgetting. If we can remember, then maybe we will choose life over death.
REBECCA GOLDSTEIN
Moral abstractions can achieve a firm universality precisely because
they are abstract. The fine details that come with real life can make for obscurity, complexity, and confoundment. I trust this confoundment far more than I do the abstractions. I trust your confoundment, Simon Wiesenthal, and I admire your fierce attention to the details that engender the severe discomfort of answerlessness.
You, a victim of the mass engine of torture and murder assembled by the Nazi beast, are summoned to hear the dying confession of an SS man who seeks something from you—he calls it “forgiveness”—in order that he might “die in peace.” (He apparently feels he has the right to die in peace; perhaps this is an unquestioned assumption surviving from his earlier religious convictions.) You are summoned for no reason other than that you are a Jew, as if “Jew” were a mass term comparable, say, to “water” or “salt.” Here is a bit of water, we say, and any sample of it will do. All water manifests the same interchangeable water properties. That a Nazi should think this way about Jews is not in the least surprising. Mass terms, mass murders, mass graves: they are all of a piece.
But is the SS man who seeks your absolution in his mortal hour still a Nazi, or does his dying confession amount to a renunciation of his creed? This is one of the questions that composes the moral perplexity you present to us. For you, Simon Wiesenthal, are not at all inclined to reciprocate the mass-term thinking of the Nazi mentality. Quite the contrary, you do not relegate the speaking form before you to being just another token of the damn-them-all-to-hell type, the Nazi beast. Despite your fear and loathing, you never shrink before the task—heroic under the circumstances—of seeing a distinctly individual person before you, and you struggle, both in his death chamber and long afterward, to figure out what manner of person he truly is.
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness Page 13
