The Sunflower Read online

  Simon's question is not about reconciliation, but rather forgiveness. Nevertheless, you cannot have forgiveness without reconciliation and you cannot have reconciliation without at least a shred of forgiveness. This forgiveness is not for those who killed or who orchestrated mass murder and on their deathbed seek to put their minds at ease, but for those who truly feel a collective guilt for the heinous crimes their ethnic/political/religious “brothers” committed in the name of that “brotherhood.” As Simon told the mother of the dying SS man, even if a member of a society did not take part in the crimes, he or she must at least share the shame of the crimes.

  I explicitly and emphatically reject the idea of collective guilt, but I do believe that there is such a thing as national or state responsibility for genocide, for mass murder, and for drumming up an artificial hatred among the ordinary people, by various means, to make that genocide easier to carry out. It cannot be stressed enough that the punishment of the guilty and some measure of justice are absolutely necessary for forgiveness or reconciliation even to be considered. If genocide goes unpunished, it will set a precedent for tomorrow's genocide. Without justice, there can never be reconciliation and real peace.

  But when speaking of crimes against international humanitarian law, the Geneva conventions and the Genocide Convention—the very instruments of international law based on and built upon the ashes of the Holocaust—we must remember that each crime against international law is a crime against humanity and not only against the person or society targeted for extinction. That is the whole point of international law. And we must also remember that each and every victim is one of the collective us, whether they be Jews in Europe of the 1940s or Muslims in Europe of the 1990s.

  As to the original question, I myself and the other readers will have to answer for themselves. I can say, however, that an argument can be made to forgive if there is a genuine recognition of guilt. But I cannot stress enough that to forget is unthinkable, both when discussing the Holocaust and Bosnia. In the end, reconciliation must be the end goal for a return to the inherent beauty of living.

  Thus at the threshold of the twenty-first century, what have we gained from our experiences with man's inhumanity toward man? Apparently not that much. After knowing what we knew about the Holocaust, the genocide of Bosnia and Herzegovina should shame us all. Of course that shame would not bring back life to the dead of Auschwitz or Treblinka, Sarajevo or Srebrenica, but that shame does make it incumbent upon us to hold accountable those who arrogantly and immorally valued their lives so much more over those of their fellow men and women.

  JEAN AMÉRY

  My high regard for your activities over the past two decades, activities that you pursued irrespective of the dangers they entailed for you personally, obliges me to comply immediately with your request to comment on the problems raised in your story, The Sunflower. An SS man who took part in the extermination was dying. On his deathbed, he was plagued by his Christian conscience which had persisted through the SS training, and with his final breaths, he asks for “absolution,” forgiveness by a Jew. You yourself—a concentration camp inmate at the time, surrounded by the thousand faces of death that assailed your brothers and continually threatened you—did not want to grant the dying man the words of forgiveness he sought so ardently, with clasped hands even. You left him without absolution. He died without consolation. That seems to haunt you. In any case, it preoccupies you. Quite rightly, you challenge the opinions of your contemporaries: those who have suffered with you, and those whom you regard, for various reasons, as moral authorities.

  As for me, I am one of those who, like yourself, escaped that giant dragnet only by chance. A survivor. Not a moral authority, to be sure. My opinion is a private one, concerning only myself, and is of no public importance whatsoever. That allows me a great deal of freedom. I can speak without fear that my words could become behavioral maxims for anyone else, regardless of the small extent to which this may apply.

  Dear Mr. Wiesenthal, you will inevitably be disappointed by my comments. Your problem is not a problem for me. Let me explain. You did not give the dying SS man absolution from a Jew. If I had been in such a situation, perhaps I would have been more yielding. Both your intransigence and my magnanimity (which is possible, but by no means certain) mean nothing to me, or rather, would mean nothing to me. As I see it, the issue of forgiving or not-forgiving in such a case has only two aspects: a psychological one and a political one. Psychologically, forgiving or not-forgiving in this specific case is nothing more than a question of temperament or feeling. I do not want to impute any other possible behavior to you, but I can easily imagine that, under only slightly different circumstances, you might have forgiven the dying man. Suppose you had seen his pleading and imploring eyes, which may have had more of an effect on you than his rasping voice and folded hands. Or suppose that just before that encounter, you had been in contact with one of those “decent” SS men, whom we all knew, who had treated you with a little bit of kindness, putting you in a more tolerant mood. Or suppose you learned that some German had helped a close relative to escape. As you know better than I, such things really did happen. So, then you might have forgiven: in my view, it would have meant just as little as your (or possibly my) refusal. So much for the psychological perspective.

  Now the political: Here too, in such a dramatically critical but certainly unique case—and therefore without any general implications—forgiving or not-forgiving is quite irrelevant. Whether you are an agnostic or a believer, I do not know, but your problem belongs to the realm of guilt and atonement; so even if we cast it in an agnostic form, the problem is a theological one, and as such, it does not exist for me, an atheist who is indifferent to and rejecting of any metaphysics of morality. I think that this does not concern individual forgiveness or individual intransigence. One can say: Your dying SS man took part in the extermination, he knew very well what he was doing. He may come to terms with his God, if he believes in one, and may just as well die unconsoled. One can also say: What difference does it make? Let him rest in peace, in the name of God or of the Devil, and if my forgiveness matters to him, I'll give it. Politically, it does not make any difference.

  Since I see the whole question only in political terms and can deal with the problem of forgiveness from this perspective only, I must abstain from approving or condemning your behavior. (The axiomatic theory of my political thought may be rooted in morality, but this is not at issue here and would lead us too far astray.) Don't think, however, that I wish to make light of the issue or avoid painful questions by shifting to the political terrain and necessarily leaving the problematic base of your story behind. Politically, I do not want to hear anything of forgiveness! I believe that you, who have devoted your life to investigating the political realm of Nazi crimes, will understand my position. Why does it matter to me? For one simple reason: what you and I went through must not happen again, never, nowhere. Therefore—and I have said and written this over and over—I refuse any reconciliation with the criminals, and with those who only by accident did not happen to commit atrocities, and finally, all those who helped prepare the unspeakable acts with their words. Only if Nazi crimes like the genocide of European Jewry are not subject to a statute of limitations now or in the future, only if everyone who committed atrocities is hunted down and finally caught, will the potential murderers of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow be prevented from realizing their criminal potential. I agree with your point in your remarkable article in Le Monde, that too many criminals are spared by the letter of the law, that too many of the murderers in uniform, too many bloody judges of yesterday, are spending their last years in peace. Your cause, if I understand you correctly, was always a political one. Just as I leave the angels and sparrows to heaven, so I leave the moral-theological, moral-philosophical question of the answer (and, just between us, there will never be one) in the hands of the licensed professionals, that is, the speculation of tenured university professors.


  Don't trouble yourself, Mr. Wiesenthal. You didn't forgive and it was certainly your right, and if you had said words of forgiveness in a fit of emotion, that would have been legitimate too. Your SS man was a devil, perhaps a poor devil. He and his death don't matter, just as the response of inmate Wiesenthal doesn't matter. What does matter is the activity of the director and founder of the Documentation Center. He has nothing to do with that criminal who died in the field hospital, but with others who live here among us—and live better than many of our old companions. The director of the Documentation Center should not allow them to live this sweet life but rather make sure that the arm of worldly justice, weak and ineffectual as it is, still reaches them. This is what I'm hoping for. Thankful for your work and with friendly greetings…

  SMAIL BALI

  Now that nearly thirty years have passed since The Sunflower was written, we can regard the horrifying events of this autobiographical story with some degree of detachment. This detachment allows for a more sober assessment of the issues the story raises concerning remorse and forgiveness. At the time of those dramatic events, the author was himself persecuted, his very existence threatened by the destructive machinery of a gruesome regime. When an SS man plagued by a bad conscience begged him for forgiveness, he saw no choice but to refuse. Most likely I would have done the same in his situation. However, many people would argue that the dying man's sincere remorse and fervent desire invited the opposite reaction, especially if one had not suffered any direct personal harm from the pleading man. The author, Simon Wiesenthal, would not have cheapened himself by granting formal forgiveness, although it would have cost him a great deal of effort. In this situation, forgiveness would have been only on his personal behalf, thus ruling out the notion of general absolution anyway. Still, it would have accomplished its purpose.

  I personally feel bound by tradition to summon up some compassion (merhamet, as Bosnians call it) for every sufferer. This desire is of course purely theoretical. Nonetheless, in order to understand a person who has carried the burden of so much injustice and suffering, we have to imagine ourselves in his position. In the words of an oriental fable, “No doctor should go to a person who has fallen from a minaret if he has not experienced this type of fall himself.” A great deal of circumspection would be required before pronouncing judgment here.

  In any case, we may view the belated remorse of the young SS man of this story as a sign of hope and a signal of a new democratic beginning for Germany. Shortly after this time, Germany evolved into a stalwart supporter and friend of the Jews. By confessing and showing his remorse, the dying man testifies to his awareness of the gravity of his crimes. Thus, for whatever time might remain to him, he would be a changed man. In religious terms this decisive change in his life would be called a conversion.

  Of course every person is responsible for his or her actions, and no one is able to absolve the guilt that one person bears toward others. No soul carries the burden of another. There is no such thing as collective guilt, since collective guilt would point fingers at the innocent as well as the guilty. We may only properly speak of general culpability if a society tolerates the development of a fundamentally perverted image of man.

  Rectifying a misdeed is a matter to be settled between the perpetrator and the victim. A third party has no proper role other than mediator. Evil cannot be offset by good when there is no genuine remorse.

  There are crimes whose enormity cannot be measured. In the view of believers, only God in His infinite mercy can cleanse the sins of the perpetrators of these crimes.

  The Sunflower broaches many other questions of crime and punishment. One of the story's central concerns is the impassive societal reaction to the transgression. Those who might appear uninvolved in the actual crimes, but who tolerate acts of torture, humiliation, and murder, are certainly also guilty. Looking away may be a comfortable but ultimately disastrous path, the effects of which are incalculable.

  The story also examines historically embedded prejudices, clichés, and stereotypes that shape the views of the masses. One of the imperative tasks of education is to come to terms with this legacy. By pinpointing mankind's failings and woes, Wiesenthal's The Sunflower proves a good guide.

  MOSHE BEJSKI

  The subject which I was asked to relate to is complex and complicated, not only because it involves issues of conscience, morality, psychology, religion, and belief, but also because the dilemma focuses on two individuals who met under abnormal circumstances and conditions, and who ostensibly behaved and reacted in a quasi-rational manner based on the appropriate ethical considerations of human beings created in the image of God.

  What is more, I was asked to relate to these events fifty years after they took place. Can considerations and behaviors be analyzed after so many years and under conditions of peace and well-being, which include the ability to overcome the spontaneous emotions caused by unexpected events? Or perhaps the distance of time and different conditions makes it difficult, if not impossible, to examine what the appropriate behavior should have been given the emotional state, the severe mental pressure, and the circumstances, which cannot be reproduced because they have never existed before and because the human mind has never invented anything like them.

  Indeed, the Nazi, the SS man Karl, is a human being who was severely injured and in the throes of death. As such, and according to rational criteria, he may be worthy not only of sympathy and understanding for his suffering and his condition, but also of pardon and forgiveness for past crimes because he had confessed to them, assuming that the confession was not just formal, but based on true remorse emanating from pangs of conscience.

  Yet, for Wiesenthal and others who lived under the same circumstances, Karl was a representative of German Nazism, or at least typical of the hundreds of thousands of SS troops and Sonderkommando who had joined up voluntarily and were fully aware of what they were doing. Together with others they not only routinely committed the most abominable crimes of oppression, starvation, humiliation, and forced hard labor to the point of death against the Jewish population, but were also involved in mass exterminations using methods that no human mind had thought of up to that time. Only the awareness of imminent and certain death induced Karl to think that his actions had been crimes against both humanity and God. Had he not been mortally wounded, he would almost certainly have continued to commit these crimes, along with his comrades, who had volunteered for these assignments of their own free will and in large numbers, never regretting their actions, but rather justifying them by claiming that they had only been carrying out orders.

  At the time of this incident Wiesenthal is only an individual, a prisoner in a camp where he is being terrorized, worked to death, starved, and humiliated. His entire family has already been annihilated in Belzec or Treblinka and he knows that his death is certain, in another hour, another day, or another week. He, Wiesenthal, was also a witness. With his own eyes he had seen the mass shootings of naked people beside the death pits, the public hangings on the gallows. He had watched so many people die; he had seen all his relatives and fellow townspeople murdered. In this respect he is a representative witness for all those who lived or were no longer alive then and as long as the atrocities continued he certainly could not free himself of the revulsion and deep anguish he felt toward the actions of the SS man, Karl, and all his comrades who continued to commit these crimes. In his confession Karl described a mother and father who jumped together with their children from a building which had been set on fire by the Nazi troops and Wiesenthal was reminded of the child, Eli, from the Lvov Ghetto, who he had known well and cared for until he disappeared.

  There are only two people in the death chamber, but each one represents an entirely different world: One—all the evil, and the horrible crimes that, up till the moment he was wounded, he himself perpetrated, and his comrades and the regime he is a part of continue to perpetrate, against human beings; and the other—the emotionally and physica
lly broken victim of those crimes, whose pain is too much to bear because of what they have done to him, his family, and his people. Whose forgiveness was being sought—that of a Jew whose fate had already been sealed by the dying man's comrades, who did not then feel, and most likely never felt, remorse.

  I never had an encounter with a dying SS man as Wiesenthal unwittingly did, but I shared his experiences in all other respects. My family was also deported to Belzec along with all the other residents of my town. I endured all the hellish nightmare of the war years in forced labor camps, in concentration and extermination camps. I saw so much death, so many executions. I was starved to death, I was degraded, made to feel subhuman; and I have forgotten none of the atrocities carried out against the Jews by the Nazi regime.

  I am afraid that anyone who has been there and experienced it all would not have behaved any differently than Wiesenthal did then, and not only because the circumstances prevented him from thinking and reacting in a rational and deliberate manner, based on moral, religious, humanitarian, or philosophical considerations. But how can forgiveness be asked of someone whose death sentence will soon be carried out by the dying man's partners in crime, who are part of the same regime, when the dying person himself admits that he too has been committing these same crimes against the Jewish people and was only stopped when the hand of God overtook him.