The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

by Simon Wiesenthal

  “Now I could see the figure in the bed far more clearly. White, bloodless hands on the counterpane, head completely bandaged with openings only for mouth, nose, and ears” (p. 25).

  You do not see the SS man's eyes (actually, there are no longer eyes there to be seen) until years later, in an old photograph. But what you do attempt, despite the aversion which must have exceeded anything that we who never underwent your trials can possibly imagine, is to get behind those oozing bandages, behind those empty eyes.

  And what do you see there? What do you show us? This SS man is one who has been susceptible to normative abstractions all his life. He is not a selfish creature who devotes himself to the gratification of his own personal desires. No, he is a dutiful sort, one who submits his will to the imperatives he sees as serving the greater good. A model boy, as his grieving mother recalls him, the parish priest's favorite.

  His submissive posture before the demands of normative abstractions does not alter when he turns from Christianity to Nazi ideology. In some fundamental sense, horrible to say, his moral nature does not change at all. As you suggest, it is not for him as it was for others: they put away their consciences as if in a wardrobe and put on the SS uniform. It seems to me, from the portrait of him that you painstakingly construct, that his “conscience,” his normative makeup, remains essentially the same both before his Nazi conversion and after.

  The abstractions to which he, as a Nazi, submitted his obedient will were not only abstract. They were as vilely opaque as those bandages with yellow stains that later covered his hollowed eyes, and they made him a criminal against humanity long before he committed the crime for which he importunes you for forgiveness. He could not even see through the bandages the Jews with whom he was very well acquainted: the family doctor, for example, whose fate elicited his parents’ concern, but not his. Damnable opacity. You, Mr. Wiesenthal, struggled to assemble a human being from behind those odious bandages that concealed his face. But he, swathed in his more-than-odious abstractions, did not see through them to the human faces on the other side.

  Until he did. In a building crammed with Jews on fire. His shocked reaction to the sight is itself bewildering. An SS man surprised to see Jews being murdered? Had he never grasped the intent of the statements equating Jews with vermin? What other concrete realizations were such abstractions meant to entail if not those three souls set ablaze; if not the fine detail that Zyklon B, the gas by which those three multiplied by millions were exterminated in their death chambers, was a roach poison?

  But strangely enough, the sight of those particular slaughtered innocents shocked him. The smallest detail clinging to real life, perhaps the undeniably human gesture of the father shielding his little son's eyes, seems to have loosened (I do not say removed) the filthy bandages from that SS man's eyes. It is, on a certain level, a far more significant conversion than his prior substitution of abstract Nazism for abstract Christianity.

  And a conversion it was. This SS man was certainly a better person, which is to say a worse Nazi, for seeing those murdered three for the terrible sight that they were. He was a better man yet for seeing their faces before him on the battlefield, and for being continuously tormented by their image behind his sightless eyes. Better and still better. But do these increments in his humanity add up, in the final reckoning, to very much at all when weighed against the horror in which he participated both in creed and deed—the one deed for which he requests of you the thing he calls “forgiveness,” as well as the countless others involving his failure to see?

  Yes, the SS man came to see, to some extent, his guilt, but not, I think, to the full extent in which that guilt exists and always will. For had he understood the enormity of his crimes, he would never have dared to ask for forgiveness. Never. To have truly seen his guilt would have been to know himself as utterly dispossessed of all chances for forgiveness. It would have been to know himself as having forfeited forever any questionable right to “die in peace.” Perhaps then, and only then, in knowing his absolute unforgivability, would it even be conceivable that he be granted forgiveness—and then only by those three burning souls, multiplied by millions.

  MARY GORDON

  The Catholic-educated Nazi officer is asking to be forgiven by a Jew in the name of all Jews whose public execution was the cornerstone of everything he pledged himself to believe in when he became a Nazi. He is asking for private forgiveness, not from the person he has harmed, but in the name of others. What does the Nazi expect to gain from being forgiven?

  Perhaps he imagines that forgiveness is a kind of magic eraser, a way of undoing what cannot temporally be undone, a way of saying, “it never happened.” It becomes, then, a narcissistic rather than a moral act because it places the perpetrator's need to be purged of guilt ahead of the victim's need for restitution or simple recognition of having been harmed.

  Forgiveness can, of course, be good for both sides, but forgetting almost never is, first because it is a form of denial, and second because only a recognition of guilt by both sides can begin to prevent repetition of the same heinous deed. By marking the sinner in some way that is unmistakable, public rituals of communal penitence insure that the deed will not be forgotten, at least for awhile.

  The Nazi officer is wrong to ask Wiesenthal for forgiveness for two reasons. First, he is wrong to ask one man to serve as a public symbol for all Jews. A symbol, by its nature, is communal, and its status can be bestowed only by the community. There is no such thing as a privately symbolic figure. A priest can forgive sins in the name of God, but he is acting outside of his own biography. His role is mediator between the community and God. But it is the community that gives him that role.

  Second, the Nazi misunderstands penance. A priest who fully understood the meaning of his role in the sacrament would never grant private absolution to one whose crime has been public. The sinner must publicly acknowledge guilt, and only then ask for absolution. Anything less than that is, I believe, a perversion of the sacrament. For this reason, many Catholics are uncomfortable with the purely private nature of confession if it lacks any form of public penitence.

  Simon Wiesenthal cannot be this dying man's confessor. As a private person, and not a priest, he may act only in his own name. No one can grant forgiveness as a private person in the name of another, for that would be theft of the wounded person's right to forgive or not to forgive.

  But one can forgive for another in a ritual context, if that ritual takes place with the authority of the community. And for the ritual to have any meaning, the atonement must match the crime. If the dying Nazi soldier wished to atone, he should have insisted that he be placed in the camps, so that he could die in the miserable circumstances of those in whose name he is asking forgiveness.

  MARK GOULDEN

  The Sunflower is remarkable for many reasons. In its own right it is a moving, sorrowful, terrifying narrative which holds the reader enthralled as it unfolds.

  It tells of a tragic experience in the life of the author, Simon Wiesenthal, whose memorable book (The Murderers Among Us) dealt with the German war criminals who tried to escape retribution. But apart from its own narrative value The Sunflower is remarkable because it poses a searing question that will challenge the moral conscience of the reader.

  The question is concerned with forgiveness—specifically, forgiveness toward the Germans for crimes which they committed less than thirty years ago. Some may say that the whole subject is slightly jejune nowadays, for there is evidence that the world has conspired to forget the monstrous atrocities that shamed mankind and made a mockery of religion and humanity, even though they occurred well within living memory.

  I always find it difficult to exercise restraint when I write or think about these fearful crimes. The mind begins to boggle at the sheer enormity of it all. Is it true, one asks oneself, that civilized human beings actually built huge, complex death chambers for the express purpose of destroying millions of other human beings like vermin?
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  Can it really be that ordinary German soldiers obeyed orders to machine-gun long rows of living people standing at the edge of vast open graves into which the riddled bodies fell in grotesque heaps?

  Did the Germans actually feed into their gas chambers over 960,000 innocent children—a number that is equivalent (if you want a visual cognate) to ten Wembley Stadiums filled to capacity with kids under thirteen?

  Do our eyes deceive us when we watch those films of the shuffling, living skeletons wandering around mountains of shriveled corpses in the camps of Belsen, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, etc., etc.? Were these zombies once ordinary normal human beings like you and me?

  To reflect on these things is to plunge oneself into a nightmare of unbearable ghastliness. The human mind is incapable of comprehending the magnitude and the mathematics of such slaughter. But, alas, it isn't a nightmare. It's all too dreadfully true and it is all recorded, in minute detail, in the vast literature on the subject that now exists.

  Just ponder this item for instance: At the recent Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt a dispute arose as to the exact number of victims who were massacred in that death camp. Finally it came out in evidence that of 4,400,000 men, women, and children (approximately the entire population of Denmark) who were condemned to Auschwitz, only 60,000 were still alive when the camp was liberated. Which means that 98.5 percent of all the deportees were methodically exterminated by the Germans. This arithmetic of butchery, this harvest of death, would stagger the imagination even if the carnage concerned rats, never mind human beings.

  Well, that was the burden of guilt which the Germans bore when the war ended, and for this culpability they have made no act of atonement as a nation. One often asked in the early days whether a people who had done these things—either by active participation or silent acquiescence—could ever live down such a legacy of inhumanity. Dare they ever lift up their heads again in civilized society? Would the brand of Cain stay forever on the German brow just as the tattooed Star of David would remain indelible on the arms of many a victim who escaped?

  These were questions which only time could answer, and time indeed has answered them. For it is a fact that within a matter of three decades, that nation which perpetuated the greatest massacre of human souls in all history—virtually before the very eyes of the world—that nation has been able to resume its place in the comity of peoples with utter self-assurance and complete composure, actually being welcomed by the president of America as “our devoted, staunch, and honorable ally.”

  Today, people don't talk any more about the mass murder of six million human beings. They don't even want to read about it any longer. Books on the subject are now categorized disparagingly as “concentration-camp stuff” and as such are virtually unsalable. The world seems to have agreed to “let the matter drop” and nobody has more sedulously promoted this “forget it” campaign than the Germans themselves—not for any particular reasons, but simply “to restore our good name,” as Adenauer once naively put it. They even tried recently to introduce a law to stop any more Nazi trials because these served only to perpetuate the legends of the gas chambers, the crematoria, and the torturings.

  By a sort of tacit consent the very nomenclature of Germany's misdeeds has, over the years, been modified so that euphemisms such as “the Holocaust,” “The Final Solution,” “Genocide,” etc., are now used to mask the inherent and stunning horror of what is plainly massacre, slaughter, and bestiality. And we are reminded always that it was the Nazis—a mythical horde of subhumans from outer space—who did it all. They descended, unbidden, on the most highly sophisticated, Kultured nation on earth and issued orders which they dare not, could not, and did not disobey. Apparently no living German was ever a Nazi; very few even saw one, and whatever atrocities did happen, took place during what is known as the “Hitler Era”—or in the “time of the Nazis”—which is the greatest collective alibi ever conceived.

  Small wonder then that the world should so quickly forget crimes (which nobody ever saw) committed by external criminals (whom nobody ever knew)?

  To forget all may be easy, but to forgive all must be something more than a pulpit platitude. First, we must ask ourselves in whose hands lies the privilege of granting forgiveness? We can, of course, say, with the ecclesiastics, that mercy and forgiveness belong entirely to God, in which case the whole dialogue comes abruptly to an end. Or we can subscribe to the dictum of the poet Dryden—“Forgiveness, to the injured doth belong.” But, unfortunately, the injured in this case (six million martyred dead) are incapable of exercising such prerogative or indeed of expressing any opinion at all.

  And if the dead can't forgive, neither can the living. How can you possibly forgive monsters who burned people alive in public; in ceremonies, staged in the open, with typical Teutonic pomp and precision? Could we even expect the Almighty to exonerate them? But it is precisely a hideous crime like this that is central to the challenging question posed in The Sunflower—was Wiesenthal right in refusing to forgive the dying Nazi? You can ignore the question, or evade it, or hedge it about with casuistic hair-splitting, but the simple issue remains—what would you have done in Wiesenthal's shoes? There is no generic answer; it is an individual dilemma that demands a personal answer.

  I, for one, would have had no hesitation in solving the problem. I figure it this way: Wiesenthal himself was about to die—ignominiously and forgotten—as a direct result of all those “ideals” and those “standards” which the dying Nazi and millions like him were proud to defend and fight for. I would have asked myself what might the young Nazi have become had he survived or, indeed, if Germany had won the war? I would have tried to visualize the Christ-like compassion and pity which the victorious Germans would have bestowed on the new million Wiesenthals now in their power. And reflecting on these things, I would have silently left the deathbed having made quite certain there was now one Nazi less in the world!

  HANS HABE

  On reading The Sunflower I was greatly excited, as everybody who reads your story must be. However, you have not asked me for literary criticism, but for my views on the problems of forgiveness. The two unspoken questions in your story interest me specially: Whom ought we to forgive, when ought we to forgive? I imagine that you did forgive the man whom you call Karl S. But that is, I fear, too simple an answer. We are not an appeal court from God. He revises our judgments, we do not revise His. God's punishment struck the SS man, bypassing all human courts. He whom men punish can still be acquitted by God: he whom men acquit God still may punish. But he whom God has punished we cannot acquit nor can we increase the Divine punishment. Least of all through hatred. He who has been punished is removed from our jurisdiction, even the words “Requiescat in pace” are a mere suggestion. We can hope that a person may rest in peace, we cannot ensure it.

  Immediately there arises the question: Ought we, can we, forgive others, murderers who are still alive?

  Here too we must be more precise. Whom do you understand by “we”? If you mean the Jews, mothers and fathers, relatives and friends of the martyred and slaughtered people, then there is a considerable shift of meaning. Murder is neither forgivable nor unforgivable. Morals are not restricted to the victims. I have always doubted the role of so-called counsel who appear on behalf of private individuals in murder cases. To judge crimes against humanity is the affair of humanity. Victor Gollancz, the English publisher, who immediately after the war wrote the word “Forgiveness” on the Jewish flag, was for me just as dubious as are the Jews who take the sword of revenge from the hand of humanity. By “we” I mean humanity, not the Jews alone.

  Is murder unforgivable? Yes, without question. Can one forgive the murderer? That is a question that is closely tied up in the complex of punishment. A desire to punish the murderer is the commandment of Justice. To forgive the murderer after he has suffered punishment is the commandment of Love. You write that Karl was “not born a murderer and did not want to die a murderer.” What has that to
do with the problem of forgiveness? It is not relevant and in no sense an excuse. Practically nobody is born a murderer. Those who are born murderers are the pathological exceptions—their deeds, as a matter of fact, are more pardonable than those who are born “healthy.” The death of Christ on the Cross is the symbol of a free human decision. He who decides to commit a murder is laden with a greater guilt than he who is driven to become a criminal by abnormal environment. Anyhow, there is hardly anybody who wanted to die a murderer, even atheists are afraid of the Hereafter.

  So we cannot forgive murderers—so long as the murder is not atoned for, either by us as jurymen or by the Supreme Judge. Every society—every society, I repeat, rests upon certain moral principles, at the head of which stands atonement for capital crimes, and this brings me to your next unspoken question: Can there be any extenuating circumstances for murder?

  It stands to reason there must be extenuating circumstances—otherwise every murder trial would be pointless—so we must examine them. In several passages, particularly in your conversation with the SS man's mother, you describe Karl's path to murder. That is the natural, but complicated, thing to do. One must not confuse the question of forgiveness with the question of punishment. If Karl were being tried by an earthly court, there would be such extenuating circumstances in his favor as youth, environment, the times, the general atmosphere, and war conditions. Nevertheless, in this case we are operating in two different dimensions. Forgiveness is a spiritual matter, punishment is a legal matter. The verdict of the court is influenced by extenuating circumstances. Such circumstances induce a milder judgment, but in no way mean that we are forgiving the murderer. The free will given to a man does not merely grant him the choice between committing a murderous deed or refraining from it. It is also a part of man's free will whether he allows justice to take its course or whether he dispenses with it. An amnesty granted to an unpunished murderer is a form of complicity in the crime. It does not foster forgiveness, it precludes it.