Jan Rice's Reviews > The Sunflower: on the possibilities and limits of forgiveness

In this book Simon Wiesenthal takes the first 100 pages to describe an event in his life and the surrealistic dilemma it posed. One day while he was in a Nazi forced labor camp in Poland, his group finished some railroad labor and got put on clean-up duty in a wartime hospital instead. On that day, a nurse chooses him at random, beckons him aside, and confirms the obvious--that he is a Jew. Then he gets taken to the bedside of a dying SS soldier (SS troops being the Nazi elite who ran the Holocaust). He is there to listen to the SS man's deathbed confession. Listen he does, all day long, as the soldier describes how he distressed his parents and rejected his faith to volunteer first for Hitler Youth and then the SS. Then the soldier confesses the horrific crime that is haunting him. Simon is convinced the man has repented but remains silent when the soldier asks for his forgiveness. He then is returned to his camp life with its ongoing brutality and random death under other SS men. He struggles with not having tendered his forgiveness, along the way getting input from the two other inmates closest to him in the camp (neither of whom survives). Eventually he ends up in a death camp for two more years. During that time he has the chance to talk with another inmate, this time a seminary student who had been destined for the priesthood before the coming of the Third Reich.

The title comes from the single sunflower the author saw planted on each Nazi soldier's grave in a cemetery. He knows the SS soldier who wanted to confess to him will be getting one, but that he himself is destined for an unmarked mass grave.

Some issues that surface in that first 100 pages: (1) treating others as not being humans, (2) questions about who can forgive, (3) seeing a Jew as a representative of a collective, (4) the mental passivity the prisoners suffered in consequence of hopelessness and dehumanization and death all around, (5) the bitter conclusion that God must be "on leave," (6) the observation of how some individuals are always on the side of whoever is in power, (7) how the acceptance that Nazis had committed incredible crimes was followed in short order by demands they be forgiven, (8) and, questions about putting on, then taking off, a murderous ideology.

A couple of quotes that impacted me:

Soon after the liberation I joined a commission for the investigation of Nazi crimes. Years of suffering had inflicted deep wounds on my faith that justice existed in the world. It was impossible for me simply to restart my life from the point at which it had been so ruthlessly disrupted. I thought the work of the commission might help me regain my faith in humanity and the things which mankind needs in life beyond the material.

The work in which I am engaged brings me in contact with many known murderers...and I see how murderers behave when accused. At the trial of the Nazis in Stuttgart only one of the accused showed remorse.... All the others bitterly disputed the truth. Many of them regretted only one thing--that witnesses had survived to tell the truth.

I had the 1970 edition. The subtitle of the 1997 edition is "On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness."

Following the first 100 pages are 32 short essays by luminaries of the day discussing the issues and answering the question of what they would have done. The range of responses is astounding--all the way from one who admits he may have finished off the SS soldier to one who condemns Simon Wiesenthal for not forgiving, saying since he didn't he shares in the SS man's guilt. The new edition contains entries by the Dalai Lama and Deborah Lipstadt.

General ideas of forgiveness range from preparing the soul to meet his or her maker in the next world to preparing an individual to resume his or her place in this world--with the latter seeming to be the more arduous hurdle, judging, at least, from the remedies proposed. That's general ideas of forgiveness. This individual case is very difficult and the answer is elusive!