The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

by Simon Wiesenthal

  If we feel that our past behavior was wrong, being forgiven means erasing that message, liberating ourselves from the idea that we are still who we used to be, and freeing ourselves to become a new person.

  To be forgiven is a miracle. It comes from God, and it comes when God chooses to grant it, not when we order it up. That is why, in the Amidah, a Jew prays three times a day for the miracle of God's forgiveness. To say that God forgives is not a statement about God, about God's emotional state. God's forgiveness is something that happens inside us, not inside God, freeing us from the shame of the past so that we can be different people, choosing and acting differently in the future.

  That was the mistake of the Nazi soldier in The Sunflower. His plea for forgiveness was addressed to someone who lacked the power (let alone the right) to grant it. If he wanted to die feeling forgiven, he should have said to himself: “What I did was terribly wrong and I am ashamed of myself for having done it. I reject that part of myself that could have done such a thing. I don't want to be a person who would do such a thing. I am still alive, though I don't know for how much longer, but the Nazi who killed that child is dead. He no longer lives inside me. I renounce him.” And if God chose to grant him the miracle of forgiveness, he would feel that he had expelled the Nazi within him as our body expels a foreign object, something that is not us, and he would die a different person than he had lived.

  Of course, had he repented of his crime earlier and not at the point of death, he would have had the opportunity of experiencing the cleansing power of repentance by facing the same situation and acting differently. Unfortunately, by summoning one Jew to absolve him of what he had done to other Jews, he leaves us doubting whether he has in fact transcended the Nazi view of seeing Jews as less than human, interchangeable entities rather than unique human beings, even as a person sins by hating all blacks, whites, Christians, Jews, Germans because of what some other blacks, whites, etc., may have done to him.

  That is what it means to be forgiven. What does it mean to forgive? A woman in my congregation comes to see me. She is a single mother, divorced, working to support herself and three young children. She says to me, “Since my husband walked out on us, every month is a struggle to pay our bills. I have to tell my kids we have no money to go to the movies, while he's living it up with his new wife in another state. How can you tell me to forgive him?” I answer her, “I'm not asking you to forgive him because what he did was acceptable. It wasn't; it was mean and selfish. I'm asking you to forgive because he doesn't deserve the power to live in your head and turn you into a bitter, angry woman. I'd like to see him out of your life emotionally as completely as he is out of it physically, but you keep holding on to him. You're not hurting him by holding on to that resentment, but you're hurting yourself.”

  Forgiving is not something we do for another person, as the Nazi asked Wiesenthal to do for him. Forgiving happens inside us. It represents a letting go of the sense of grievance, and perhaps most importantly a letting go of the role of victim. For a Jew to forgive the Nazis would not mean, God forbid, saying to them “What you did was understandable, I can understand what led you to do it and I don't hate you for it.” It would mean saying “What you did was thoroughly despicable and puts you outside the category of decent human beings. But I refuse to give you the power to define me as a victim. I refuse to let your blind hatred define the shape and content of my Jewishness. I don't hate you; I reject you.” And then the Nazi would remain chained to his past and to his conscience, but the Jew would be free.

  LAWRENCE L. LANGER

  I have no idea what I might have done in Simon Wiesenthal's place, nor do I believe that the question is a legitimate one. Role-playing about Holocaust reality trivializes the serious issues of judgment and forgiveness that The Sunflower raises. In my opinion, discussion should focus on the SS man's request, and Wiesenthal's response to it.

  The mass murder of European Jewry is an unforgivable crime. By his own description, the SS man provides the details: Jewish men, women, and children are herded into a building, hand grenades are thrown in, setting it on fire; the SS men then shoot Jews—including little children—trying to escape the flames through exits or by jumping from windows. Can one repent such a monstrous deed? I do not see how. The real test of the SS man's spiritual integrity came at the moment he received the order to shoot. At that instant he was still a morally free man (assuming he had not taken part in earlier crimes). By agreeing to shoot instead of deferring to a higher authority and disobeying the order, he failed the test and permanently cut himself off from the possibility of forgiveness. This may not be true for other crimes—but the mass murder of European Jewry is not an ordinary crime.

  No matter what the criminals—the men and women who planned, authorized, collaborated in, and carried out such actions—say afterward, the crime of the Holocaust remains unforgivable. How can a criminal be forgiven for an unforgivable crime?

  It seems to me that in refusing to extend forgiveness to the culprit, Wiesenthal unconsciously acknowledged the indissoluble bond fusing the criminal to his crime. Although many have hailed the sincerity of the SS man's repentance, we have no way of verifying this. All we have is Wiesenthal's remembered account, a reproduced voice, not an authentic one. The long monologues of the dying SS man cannot be verbatim, only approximate. Hence the mystery of his inner feelings remains swathed in the bandages that encase his body. Wiesenthal does not enter into a dialogue with him, which might have revealed much; he only listens.

  He does carry on dialogues with his fellow Jews, and with an apprentice priest named Bolek. These dialogues give us an important clue to the dilemma we are facing: the language of the exchanges does more to shape our attitude toward the SS man's request for forgiveness than the actual crime he has committed. For example, Bolek understandably chastises Wiesenthal for his failure to forgive: “Whom had the SS man to turn to? None of those he had wronged were still alive.” When we call the murder of a helpless Jewish father and child a “wrong,” we ease the crime into the realm of familiar and forgivable transgressions and relieve ourselves of the burden of facing its utter horror.

  Perhaps unwittingly, Wiesenthal fills Bolek's mouth with questionable platitudes: “When one is face to face with death one doesn't lie”; “he had no opportunity to expiate the sins which he had committed”; he showed “genuine, sincere repentance for his misdeeds.” I believe that anyone capable of labeling the murder of defenseless Jews a “misdeed” sacrifices his right to comment on the subject. Trapped by his theological word-horde, the novice weaves around the by now unmentioned details of the crime a verbal tapestry of exculpation that shifts the onus of responsibility from the criminal to the victim. Of course, Wiesenthal and not Bolek records these words for the reader, and this raises a question of narrative authority in the text of The Sunflower that would require separate investigation.

  The “disappearing criminal” is one of the most dangerous and lamentable legacies of the Holocaust experience. Ironically, in asking forgiveness of a Jew, the SS man transfers the weight of moral decision from himself to one of his potential victims. This dynamic, unfortunately, recurs in numerous testimonies of Holocaust survivors who, in the absence of real malefactors like the dying SS man, sometimes blame themselves for acts or consequences of which they are perfectly innocent. For me, the SS man's request betrays his utter failure to understand the nature of his crime: it seems a desperate last gesture to escape his guilt, though we will never know what his buried motives were. He may not know them himself.

  Words like “wrong” and “misdeed” grew up in a universe of discourse oblivious to places like Auschwitz and Majdanek, where gas chambers and crematoria flourished. The long list of exonerating terms that appear in The Sunflower—atonement and expiation, repentance and absolution, guilt and forgiveness—to me reflects a valiant but misguided and ultimately doomed effort to reclaim for a familiar vocabulary an event that has burst the frame of conventional judgmental
language. Jean Améry's classic study of his ordeal at the hands of the Gestapo and in Auschwitz, At the Mind's Limits, had for its original German title Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (Beyond guilt and atonement). Améry not only promotes Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Gut und Böse) to modern times, but also invites us to reconsider the terminology with which we will evaluate the most hideous crime of the twentieth century.

  Deep in the bowels of Dante's Inferno is a sinner whose presence must have confounded Dante's readers, because they believed that this sinner was still alive. In fact, he was; but Dante the poet invents the heretical idea of acts so outrageous that they condemn the soul of the sinner to eternal damnation before his death. Hence the possibility of an unrepentable and thus unforgivable crime is not a new one, though Dante could not have known how this quirk in his orderly design for Hell might herald our current threatening impasse about atrocities that are beyond guilt and atonement.

  Imagine an SS man today standing by a mass grave at Chelmno or Treblinka or Babi Yar, and saying “I'm sorry; I repent what I have done.” His words would drift down among the hundreds of thousands of wasted corpses or their ashes, and then sink further, to that lower place where they would echo amidst the unforgiven and unforgivable spirits of those eternally damned for having consented to these monstrous acts to begin with. That is where our search for guilt should begin—and end.

  The Sunflower should prompt us—has always prodded me—to shift the locus of our discussion. The vital question to ask about this text is not whether Wiesenthal should have forgiven the SS man. It is rather why the SS man, as a young boy, against his father's wishes, joined enthusiastically in the activities of the Hitler Youth; why, again presumably against his father's wishes, he volunteered for the SS (as free a choice as a man could make at the time); why he then pursued a career in that murderous league of killers without protest, including the episode he tells of on his deathbed; and most important of all, why he had to wait until he was dying to feel the time had come for repentance and forgiveness. On these issues, the SS man is deftly silent.

  Such are the questions, only implicit in Wiesenthal's narrative, that should challenge our imagination. Simon Wiesenthal himself was and remains innocent of any wrong.

  PRIMO LEVI

  The events you evoke occurred in a world which was shaking on its foundations and in an atmosphere completely impregnated with crime. Under these conditions, it is not always easy, indeed it is perhaps impossible, to assign an absolute value to right and wrong: it is in the nature of crime to create situations of moral conflict, dead ends of which bargaining or compromise are the only conditions of exit; conditions which inflict yet another wound on justice and on oneself.

  When an act of violence or an offense has been committed it is forever irreparable: it is quite probable that public opinion will cry out for a sanction, a punishment, a “price” for pain; it is also possible that the price paid be useful inasmuch as it makes amends or discourages a fresh offense, but the initial offense remains and the “price” is always (even if it is “just”) a new offense and a new source of pain.

  This having been said, I think I can affirm that you did well, in this situation, to refuse your pardon to the dying man. You did well because it was the lesser evil: you could only have forgiven him by lying or by inflicting upon yourself a terrible moral violence. But, of course, this refusal is not the answer to everything, and it is quite easy to see why you were left with doubts: in a case like this it is impossible to decide categorically between the answers yes and no; there always remains something to be said for the other side.

  In your case, as you were a Häftling, that is a predestined victim, and since, at that moment, you felt that you represented the entire Jewish people, you would have been at fault in absolving your man, and you would perhaps today be experiencing a deeper remorse than you feel at not having absolved him.

  What would this pardon have meant for the dying man and for you? Probably a great deal for the former; a kind of sacralization, a purification which would have freed his religious conscience, all too tardily aroused, from the terror of eternal punishment. But I think that, for you, it would have been meaningless: certainly it would not have meant “you are guilty of no crime,” nor “you committed a crime against your will or without knowing what you were doing.” On your part it would have been an empty formula and consequently a lie.

  I should like to add this: the figure of the SS man as portrayed in your book does not appear as fully reinstated from the moral point of view. Everything would lead one to believe that, had it not been for his fear of impending death, he would have behaved quite otherwise: he would not have repented until much later, with the downfall of Germany or perhaps never. The act of “having a Jew brought to him” seems to me at once childish and impudent. Childish because it is too reminiscent of the defenseless child who cries out for help: it is quite possible that in his mind, bent as it was by propaganda, the “Jew” was an abnormal being—half-devil, half-miracle worker, capable in any case of supernatural deeds. Did Himmler not believe something similar when he ordered the suspension of the Lager massacres, in the hope that the “Jewish International” would assist Germany in concluding a separate peace with the West?

  And impudent, because once again, the Nazi was using the Jew as a tool, unaware of the danger and the shock his request must have constituted for the prisoner: his action, examined in depth, is tinged with egoism, since one detects in it an attempt to load onto another one's own anguish.

  DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT

  Teshuvah, repentance, derived from the Hebrew word “to return,” is Judaism's process of saying I'm sorry to those we have wronged. It is more than repentance but is designed to make our relationship with both God and those around us whole again. Judaism believes that God more than accepts the repentant person, God desires people to return. Done properly, teshuvah can result in the sinner returning to a repaired relationship with both God and with his/her fellow humans, even as God returns to the sinner. In the Talmud we read: “In a place where people who have done teshuvah stand, the purest zadik (righteous person) cannot stand.” The fact that a repentant sinner is more righteous than a pure zadik doesn't seem to make sense. Maimonides offers an interesting insight on teshuvah which may explain this dilemma. Citing the verse from Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden fruit, God says: “Now Adam is like one of us [c'echad memenu], knowing the difference between right and wrong.”

  The simple explanation that after humans have sinned they become Godlike seems puzzling. In the Mishnah Torah Maimonides reads the verse differently. He puts a period after echad, which he translates as unique, and then translates memenu, as from within himself. “Now Adam is echad, unique. Memenu, from within himself, he knows the difference between right and wrong.” The human species is unique in the world, in that humans use their own intelligence and reason to distinguish good and evil.

  So too those who have done wrong and then performed teshuvah have reached a new level: from within themselves, they know the true difference between right and wrong. It is this unique human ability to know the difference between right and wrong which makes teshuvah transformational. But repentance is not a simple thing. Before we can evaluate the prisoner's response to the soldier from a Jewish perspective it is necessary to delineate the various steps entailed in repentance.

  First one must ask forgiveness of the aggrieved party. This personal encounter is a sine qua non when it comes to sins between two human beings. A number of years ago, on 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace interviewed Chuck Colson, former head of the Nixon White House Plumbers, the Watergate era dirty tricks unit. Wallace asked Colson, who while in jail had become a devout Christian, if he felt any need to go to the people whose lives he so severely dislocated and apologize to them. “No,” Colson answered, “I have made peace with God in my heart.” This is in striking contrast to teshuvah, which calls for going to the wronged party first. Judaism believ
es that it is only through human interaction that the victim can best be healed and the wrongdoer most profoundly changed. Making peace with God comes later. By forcing a face-to-face encounter with the aggrieved party Jewish tradition teaches that sin is not a generalized amorphous act but something quite specific done against a particular person or group of people. If I sin, I cannot go to someone else who has some remote connection with the person I have harmed and ask that third party for forgiveness.

  After confronting the person against whom the sin has been committed and trying to correct that wrong, one turns to God. Then one verbally confesses one's sins, expresses shame and regret for having committed this act, and resolves never to act that way again. But this does not yet bring one to the highest or most complete level of the process, teshuvah gemurah, complete teshuvah. This is achieved when the individual is in the same situation in which he or she originally sinned and chooses not to repeat the act. The person still has the potential to commit that sin again; i.e., his/her strength has not diminished nor has the capability been lost. Nonetheless, they choose not to repeat it.

  Finally, it is important to differentiate between teshuvah, repentance, and kaparah, atonement. Atonement only comes after one bears the consequences of one's acts. Some might ask, is not repentance enough? Why is punishment also necessary? Judaism is founded on the notion that actions have consequences: righteous acts result in blessing, evil acts in punishment. When King David sinned by scheming to have Bathsheba's husband killed so that he could have her for his own, he subsequently performed teshuvah. (His genuine remorse is evident in Psalm 51, written after he committed his heinous crime.) Nonetheless he was punished for his actions. Only then was his relationship with God returned to its original place.