Wiesenthal’s Narrative: The Sunflower, Term Paper Example

In The Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal (1997) presents us with a moral dilemma of almost unthinkable magnitude: as a Jewish inmate of a Nazi concentration camp, he was summoned to the bedside of a dying SS man. The SS man, Karl, confessed to heinous crimes against the Jewish people. Expressing a seemingly sincere and deep sense of remorse and guilt, Karl pleaded for Wiesenthal to forgive him. For Wiesenthal, however, this was something he did not feel that he was prepared to do. Years later, he visited Karl’s mother to give her a note from her son, but he refrained from telling her what Karl had told him.

The seminal question, of course, is Did Wiesenthal do the right thing? Of course, this is not—cannot—be an easy question, or a simple one. In fact, it is arguably quite a bit more complex even than it appears on the surface. In the symposium that forms the second part of the book, a number of very different answers are given. These might be categorized, albeit somewhat loosely, into the “forgiving” versus “non-forgiving” camps, but even within these camps there is considerable variation.

For example, Moshe Bejski argued against the idea that Wiesenthal even had the prerogative or the moral standing to grant forgiveness to Karl (Wiesenthal, 1997, p. 115). In fact, Bejski claims, “such an act of mercy would have been a kind of betrayal and repudiation of the memory of millions of innocent victims who were unjustly murdered, among them, the members of his family” (p. 115). For Bejski, the request goes too far: it is too much for Karl to ask of Simon, even if Simon believes he has the moral legitimacy to forgive Karl for participating in the mass murder of other Jews.

Moreover, Bejski argues, it is not enough that Karl was sorry in the end (Wiesenthal, 1997, pp. 116-117). A deathbed conversion, through an expression of remorse, is not sufficient in such a case. “Even in normal criminology and penology only true regret accompanied by reformed behavior can be considered a justification for lightening a sentence,” Bejski argues, “and even then not necessarily in the case of serious crimes” (pp. 116-117). Similarly, Berger argues that Wiesenthal did the right thing: by withholding forgiveness, he respected the memory of the innocent victims whom Karl had, let us not forget, slaughtered in cold blood (p. 118). Interestingly, Berger also argues that Wiesenthal did the right thing by withholding the truth from Karl’s mother: by refraining from telling her of her son’s crimes, he effectively preserved her memory of her beloved son as he had been, as she remembered him (p. 118). This illusion, Wiesenthal is quite clear, would not have survived him telling her the truth, and so, Berger argues, Wiesenthal did her a kindness (p. 118).

In fact, Berger explains, the argument that Wiesenthal should not have forgiven Karl, and thus was right to refrain from doing so, is based on a well-established doctrine in Judaism concerning the nature of sin. In Judaism, sin committed by humans against God is one type of sin, beyn adam le-makom, while sin committed by humans against humans is another, beyn adam le-adam (p. 119). With regards to the second type of sin, Berger avers, “I may forgive one who has sinned against me. I may not forgive one who has taken the life of another” (p. 119).

And here Berger articulates a quite sophisticated argument. Not only did Simon rightly refrain from forgiving Karl, but Karl’s request was fundamentally inappropriate (Wiesenthal, 1997, p. 119). In fact, it fundamentally betrayed the ongoing influence that Nazi racial thinking had on Karl (p. 119). Karl’s request for ‘a Jew’ to hear his confession, Berger argues, is tantamount to saying, in effect, that “Jews were not individuals with souls, feelings, aspirations, and emotions”, but rather “an amorphous, undifferentiated mass” (p. 119). Berger goes so far as to charge that Karl wants to “’cleanse’ his own soul at the expense of a Jew” (p. 119).

Berger also observes that Karl showed no moral courage when he was in the situations in question, i.e. when he was actually participating in the mass murders of Jews (Wiesenthal, 1997, p. 119). Berger even points out that there were cases of disobedience within the Third Reich’s machineries of death, wherein the various henchmen of the Nazi regime refused to carry out orders and, for whatever reason, were not punished (p. 119). The principle would remain in any case, of course: doing the right thing is harder than doing the wrong thing; disobeying the orders of a murderous regime by refusing to massacre innocent people who are trying to escape a burning building is a risky act of moral courage, and unfortunately it was not one that Karl was able to bring himself to take (p. 119). Thus, Berger argues, we cannot possibly take Karl’s ‘repentance’ as being worthy of the name: we are in the land of ‘cheap grace’ here, forgive and forget, unburden your soul, feel better, and achieve eternal bliss in heaven (p. 119).

How to even begin to answer these charges? The case made so ably by these contributors seems damning indeed. On the other hand, Alkalaj points out that Wiesenthal’s dilemma is certainly not whether or not he should forgive someone who is actively committing crimes. Instead, Wiesenthal’s problem is that not only has the SS man asked for forgiveness, but he seems truly and legitimately remorseful for the evil he has done (Wiesenthal, 1997, p. 103). That is a much harder proposition to answer.

Another, again quite different, perspective comes from Jean Améry. Améry argues that there were two levels at which Wiesenthal’s dilemma mattered: the psychological and the political (Wiesenthal, 1997, p. 107). Wiesenthal could not bring himself to forgive the man, but Améry argues that if things had been even a little bit different, he might have been able to (p. 107). “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”, Améry suggests (p. 107). On the psychological dimension, Améry argues, it is all a question of how Wiesenthal’s mind processed events at the time (p. 107). Whether he forgave Karl or not was not really important at all (p. 107).

Similarly, with regards to the political realm, Améry regards forgiveness as irrelevant. On the one hand, Améry says, the SS man “knew very well what he was doing”, and “may come to terms with his God, if he believes in one, and may just as well die unconsoled” (Wiesenthal, 1997, p. 107). On the other hand, one could say “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” (p. 107). As with the psychological, so with the political, Améry argues: either way, it does not matter. The SS man committed the crimes that he committed, Wiesenthal was well within his rights to withhold forgiveness, and did so, but might just as easily have granted it if things had worked out even a little bit differently (pp. 107-108).

On the other hand, Cheong and DiBlasio (2007) argue for a view of forgiveness, grounded in love, that extends to and includes enemies. After all, Christ himself commands believers to love our enemies: “’But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you’” (Matthew 5:44, NKJV). As Cheong and DiBlasio (2007) observe, this is a very explicit command, and as such it is a requirement for all believers to observe (p. 19). But of course, there is much more here: after all, that still leaves the difficult question of how to forgive and yes, love our enemies. On top of this, is it not hubris, the very height of audacity, to say that a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp should forgive, and feel love towards, an SS man, ‘even’ a contrite one?

Literally the only way that we mortals can make sense of this command, at least on this side of eternity, is a perspective that is not grounded in the merely human. If we are to practice enemy love, we must look beyond our own limitations, the shortcomings of our perspective, and try to take an eternal perspective (Cheong & DiBlasio, 2007, p. 19). The key to this is faith: we must have faith in God, faith that He knows what He is doing, and that He can help us to perform all that He asks of us (p. 19). Cheong and DiBlasio refer to 1 John 4:4, which reads: “You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (NKJV).

As DiBlasio (1999) explains, forgiveness is necessary if we are to maintain our spiritual relationships with God, and spiritually healthy relationships with other people (p. 250). Forgiveness is the will of God, and it is something that He has demonstrated towards us. Forgiving others, DiBlasio argues, is necessary if we are to experience all that God would give us (p. 250). And yes, it is very natural for the human heart to resist forgiveness: it is natural because it is what our flesh wants, while the Holy Spirit wants us to resist our flesh and rise above it, in order to become more like God (p. 250). As DiBlasio says, “Forgiveness is a choice to let go of unforgiveness” (p. 251).

Of course, the ultimate example of enemy love is that patterned by God in the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:6-11). Fundamentally, what is required from us, scripturally, is that we love and forgive our enemies, modeling the kind of love and forgiveness we have experienced from Christ (Cheong & DiBlasio, 2007, p. 20). In fact, Cheong and DiBlasio draw on the beautiful testimony of Corrie ten Boom, a devout Dutch Christian famous for hiding Jews during the Nazi occupation, concerning her encounter with a former Nazi guard: she reported that she was at first unable to forgive him, and so she asked God to give her His forgiveness (p. 22). She took his hand, and felt an intense upwelling of love for him. In her words: “And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His” (p. 22).

Practicing enemy love is not easy: by definition, it is fraught with challenges and it is very difficult and very painful. And yet, it is necessary, for our own spiritual well-being and peace of mind as well as that of the one who has wronged us (Cheong & DiBlasio, 2007, pp. 22-23). Indeed, there is such a connection: not only is it in our best spiritual interest to do this, but it is also in the best interests of our enemy. What is more powerful than forgiveness and love? And what more poignant symbol of the power of forgiveness and love for enemies than the cross of Christ? (p. 23).

This sacrificial love could not be costlier. Some of the most prominent cases are the most soul-stirring precisely because of the enormity of the offense that occasions the forgiveness on the part of the one who has been wronged towards the one who has wronged them. Indeed, Brown refers to, and praises, Nelson Mandela, imprisoned by South Africa’s apartheid regime for some twenty-seven years: Mandela responded by forgiving those who had wronged him (Wiesenthal, 1997, p. 123). And in another scene that sounds straight out of a dramatization of the Biblical concept of forgiveness, Brown discusses the story of Tomas Borge, a Nicaraguan Sandinista fighter (p. 123). Borge was captured and subjected to brutal torture by the contras. After the war, he was given an incredible opportunity when his tormentor was arrested, put on trial, and convicted—and the court gave Borge the right “to name the punishment appropriate for his torturer” (p. 123). As Brown recounts, Borge’s words were: “’My punishment is to forgive you’” (p. 123).

But did Wiesenthal have the moral standing to forgive Karl? After all, Karl was attempting to unburden his soul to Wiesenthal on account of atrocities he had committed against other, individual Jews, not Wiesenthal specifically. Cargas engages with the possibility that perhaps it is not for us—or for Wiesenthal—to forgive Karl (Wiesenthal, 1997, p. 125). Is forgiveness really required of us in all situations?

Here, perhaps the first point should be that Karl massacred those Jews because they were Jews. Berger charges that Karl is engaging still in Nazi thinking, namely that all Jews are simply an amorphous and undifferentiated whole, but I find this conclusion deeply unfounded. Karl was effectively refuting Nazi propaganda, by repenting of what he had done to, yes, individual Jews because of the fanatical and hate-fueled anti-semitism of the Nazis’ terrible regime. This alone arguably, at the very least, makes Wiesenthal’s moral standing with respect to the crime relevant. Perhaps a non-Jew who sympathized deeply with the Jews, a Bonhoeffer, for example, would have done nearly as well or just as well.

In any case, the seminal point is really that Karl is trying to seek forgiveness for what he has done from a representative of the community of people whom he has wronged. Karl cannot seek forgiveness from the specific Jews whom he has wronged, because they have all perished. Simon is a Jew, and as such is the victim of the very same murderous Nazi regime. Surely he has at least some standing to grant Karl forgiveness?

Or perhaps another aspect of this is that it is not only a collective matter, but also an individual matter—for both parties. There is a collective dimension to this, as Alkalaj recognizes, as well as an individual one (Wiesenthal, 1997, p. 103). The collective level is the crimes of the Third Reich against the Jews, and against so many other peoples as well. The individual level is Karl, the dying SS man wracked with guilt and grief for his many sins, and Simon Wiesenthal, a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp. As audacious as it may sound, from a Scriptural perspective perhaps the best way to describe things is that Karl needed to be forgiven, and Simon needed to forgive him. Yes, humanity’s great need is to be forgiven by God (Rom. 3:23, 6:23), but it is still true, as the parable of the two debtors (Luke 7:36-50) demonstrates, that individuals need to forgive each other.

In his masterful work Embodying Forgiveness, Jones (1995) argues for a vision of true forgiveness, costly forgiveness based on costly grace, as opposed to cheap forgiveness based on “cheap grace” (pp. 5-6). This model is not original to Jones, for as Jones explains, it comes from Bonhoeffer, a courageous German Christian pastor who resisted the Nazis and was ultimately martyred by them. One of the things that Bonhoeffer specifically lamented about the Christianity of his day (and sadly, in this as in so many other things his criticisms were applicable to the contemporary church as well), was the loss of confession (p. 17). It was necessary, Bonhoeffer believed, for believers to confess their sins to each other: after all, is it not the case that sin damages our relationships with each other? (p. 17).

When we sin, we damage our relationships with God, and when that sin is directed at another person, we damage our relationship with that person as well (Jones, 1995, pp. 16-17). Karl the SS man committed many very terrible sins against Jews. Of course he needed to confess! While his principal need was to confess his sins to God and seek forgiveness, he also did the right thing by seeking forgiveness from a representative of the community he had wronged. If anything, Karl showed moral courage by doing this, because he demonstrated a changed heart.

Thoughts are private, and anyone can pray anything—or claim that they have—to any version of God that they may hold to. Theirs might even be the ‘cheap grace’ version of God, the understanding of God as the great Dispenser of Favors and Granter of Good Feelings. What matters, what really counts, is what we do. Forgiveness, Jones (1995) argues, is not just about what is going on inside our heads—what private prayers we may have aimed at Heaven—but rather what we do. Forgiveness of others or sincere repentance and receipt of forgiveness is a process that we must embody (pp. 17-19).

Bonhoeffer also held that confessing one’s sin to another was essential for ensuring that one’s sin was forgiven (Jones, 1995, p. 18). How else to guard against self-deception? Moreover, confession to another is very good, Bonhoeffer believed, for breaking the individual of pride (p. 18). However, Jones did note that it should not necessarily be presumed that this is always required (the individual may already be humble, and even quite fragile and vulnerable) (p. 18). Again, bringing this back to the situation with Wiesenthal and Karl, Karl’s need was to confess. One of the contributors suggested that he could ‘simply’ have gone to a priest of his own denomination, but to what end? The priest would not have been a member of the community that Karl had been so active in slaughtering. Worse, the priest might even be complicit, to some degree, in serving in such a capacity amongst the Wehrmacht.

I think the Dalai Lama had the right of it, in his entry in the symposium. The Dalai Lama first touches on some of the atrocities that the Chinese have committed in his land: over 1.2 million Tibetans, he tells us, “one-fifth of the country’s population, have lost their lives due to massacre, execution, starvation, and suicide” (Wiesenthal, 1997, pp. 129-130). This is a simply stupefying figure. And yet, the Dalai Lama tells us, anger and condemnation are not the Buddhist way. He recounts the story of a Tibetan monk, whom he met after the monk had been imprisoned for about eighteen years by the Chinese government. When the Dalai Lama asked him about the greatest threat or danger that the monk had faced in those eighteen years, the monk’s response amazed him: “he said that he most feared was losing his compassion for the Chinese” (p. 130).

On the other hand, Eugene Fisher argued that Karl was wrong to put Wiesenthal in that position (Wiesenthal, 1997, p. 132). This is another version of the argument, often found in these pages, about moral legitimacy: Karl’s sins were not Wiesenthal’s to forgive. Costly forgiveness, Fisher is arguing, requires that the offending party seek forgiveness by demonstrating a changed heart. His chief example, and the centerpiece of his argument, has to do with the question of whether the Catholic Church has apologized to the Jews for its historic role in promoting anti-semitism, and for failing to try to prevent the Holocaust (p. 133).

The answer that Fisher gives is very interesting, and illuminating in many ways: he argues that the Church “has expressed its repentance before God and before all humankind. It has refrained from asking ‘the Jews’… for ‘forgiveness’” (Wiesenthal, 1997, p. 133). A couple of key points here: the reason that the Church has refrained from doing this, Fisher explains, is that first of all, there is the problem of treating of “the Jews”: since Jews are individual people, after all, who gets to speak for them? Moreover, there is the matter of cheap grace. Would it not be cheap grace to simply ‘ask for forgiveness’, as if a few platitudes and a few mea culpas could atone for such terrible crimes?

Fleischner argues that a key distinction must be drawn between the scriptural requirement for believers to forgive wrongs done to them, and the idea, expressed in Karl’s request, that someone should forgive one who has wronged someone else (Wiesenthal, 1997, p. 140). According to Fleischner, Christ’s command to love our enemies and turn the other cheek is specifically interpersonal with respect to the perpetrator of wrongs and the one who has been wronged: the one who is the victim of the misdeed must not retaliate, and they must practice ‘enemy love’ (p. 140). What they are most certainly not asked to do is to forgive crimes committed against other people (pp. 140-141).

For Fleischner, then, it was simply impossible for Simon to even grant Karl his request: Karl was asking Simon to forgive him for terrible crimes that he, Karl, had committed against other people, specifically other Jews (Wiesenthal, 1997, p. 141). As such, there is no way for Karl to atone for his crime, and Simon cannot forgive him (p. 142). Fleischner suggests, too, that Simon could have referred Karl to God’s mercy, telling him that only God could forgive him since Karl could not make restitution for his sins (p. 142).

Still, I return to the Dalai Lama and his story of the monk who feared losing compassion for the Chinese. Sometimes the individual needs to make their peace with a collective, whether a community that has wronged them, or one that they have wronged. Karl and Simon were two individuals, and thus their interactions were personal. And yet, they each represented, in a very real sense, parts of an enormous crime. True, Simon could not grant Karl some kind of blanket absolution for his crimes. True, Simon could not speak for all Jews, and obviously Karl could not speak for all SS men, let alone all Germans.

But is that really the seminal point? Perhaps a great deal of this depends on the state of Karl’s own heart. I have been arguing that his action in seeking forgiveness from a Jew was a good thing, even a needful thing: it was a costly, honest signal of his sincere desire to repent of his sins. And yet, perhaps Karl was seeking some kind of salvation write-off, a quick conscience-fixer. Perhaps he was seeking to cleanse his soul at a Jew’s expense. I know this for sure: I do not know the state of Karl’s heart at that time. Only God knows what was going on in Karl’s heart, but I am prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Would an SS man who was not sincerely repentant seek out the forgiveness of a Jew? In Karl’s words I hear a haunted man, saddled with the guilt and shame of his own evil deeds, desiring to take some step out of the darkness and towards the light. As audacious as it may sound of me to say it, but if this is not teshuvah, turning towards or returning to, what is? We can speculate and cast aspersions of doubt on the purity of his motives, but is it really too much to believe that a man who, by his own admission, was troubled by what he had done even before he was mortally wounded, would finally seek to be redeemed in some way?

The Scriptures are very clear that no one is righteous (Rom. 3:10, 23): we are all, every single one of us, sinners in need of the free gift of salvation purchased by the blood of Christ (Rom. 3:24, 6:23, 8:1-2). Fundamentally, in the eyes of God, Karl was just as much in need of forgiveness for his sins as Simon—and the same for every single one of us. Perhaps, with his life drawing to a close, Karl glimpsed something of this eternal truth, and decided he could not die with such terrible sins weighing on his soul. It certainly seems clear that he realized the true monstrosity of his deeds. Is it too much to believe that he decided that he had become something he should not have become, and desired to do the one thing that he could still do? Mortally wounded and dying, Karl could scarcely have affected the escape of Jews from the clutches of Hitler’s terrible system of concentration camps. It was too late to refuse an order to machine-gun Jews escaping a burning building. Some may read cowardice or convenience into Karl’s deathbed confession, but again, I find it somewhat unlikely in light of the fact that he confessed to a Jew in the first place. And ultimately, of course, only God knows the true state of any individual’s heart (Jeremiah 17:10).

What about the argument that Simon was not empowered to speak for all Jews? Could Karl’s request really be valid and just? Was it not audacious of Karl to ask Simon to forgive him on behalf of all of the Jews? Except, Flannery notes, Karl did not ask Simon to do any such thing (Wiesenthal, 1997, p. 137). Instead, Karl asked Simon only to hear his confession for what he, Karl, had done, and to forgive him (p. 137). Fundamentally, Flannery says, “the right to speak for all Jews is public and juridical, which does not apply here” (p. 137). Moreover, let us say that Simon forgave Karl, and Karl mistook this for some sort of collective forgiveness and died happily, in Flannery’s words, “where would be the harm?” (p. 137). If his heart was truly repentant of his sin—and based on Wiesenthal’s account this seems entirely plausible, even probable—then he could well have died in a state of grace, with a saving knowledge of Christ as his lord and savior. Through the eyes of eternity, that is what truly matters, not the hypothetical of whether he might or might not have interpreted Simon’s forgiveness, had Simon granted it, as somehow being on behalf of all Jews, or of all the Jews whom Karl had murdered.

Forgiveness is, or ought to be, costly by its very definition. Forgiveness means giving up one’s own right to be angry and hateful, to seek vengeance of some kind. God demonstrated the ultimate form of forgiveness, forgiveness based on the love of enemies, by sending Christ to die on the cross for us while we were still His enemies (Romans 5:8). Thus, in practicing ‘enemy love’ and forgiveness based on such love, we are striving to emulate God and follow His example, the model He has set for us. Given the situation in which Wiesenthal found himself with Karl, it is very understandable that he could not bring himself to forgive Karl. Still, from a Biblical perspective, we are required to forgive our enemies, both for our own spiritual well-being and for theirs. Such costly forgiveness is difficult, painful, and it requires everything in us: it requires that we obey Christ’s exhortation to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Him (Matthew 16:24). This is the most difficult thing for us to do, but it is also the only way to change the world by shining the light of Christ in the darkness.

References

Cheong, R. K., & DiBlasio, F. A. (2007). Christ-like love and forgiveness: A Biblical foundation for counseling practice. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 26(1), pp. 14-25.

DiBlasio, F. A. (1999). Forgiveness: Interventions with Christian couples and families. Marriage & Family: A Christian Journal, 2(3), pp. 247-258.

Jones, L. G. (1995). Embodying forgiveness: A theological analysis. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Wiesenthal, S. The sunflower: On the possibilities and limits of forgiveness. Rev. ed. New York: Schoken Books.