Simon Wiesenthal

Sunflowers

Synopsis

Summer 1946– my first trip into bombed-out Southern Germany. When I asked to see Karl's mother I was shown a house in which only a few apartments were still inhabitable. I was received by an oldish lady. She was the widow of a shop foreman. The black-bordered picture on the wall was the first thing I saw. For the first time I was struck by his eyes. I sat down and didn't know how to begin. A scene, three years past, rose up in my mind.

I said: "Your son asked me to look you up." The woman started to cry and told me that her life had lost its purpose, told me things I already knew. "He was a good boy, he sang in the church choir. Then Hitler came. My husband was a socialist, he had plenty of trouble and didn't get along with his son. But Karl was a good child. He often said to me that he didn't understand his father and that his father did not understand the new times. I felt caught as between hammer and evil, between husband and son.

My husband always said things were bound to end badly. They were quite estranged. And then the War came. My son volunteered. My husband said nothing, didn't talk about the victories or the defeats. And then, one day, this blow fell. I got a small package containing my son's possessions, he had died in a hospital in Lemberg. And then came the accident in the factory, and I was a widow."

The old woman went to a closet and brought out a small bundle. It contained a notebook, a watch and some other small items. She handled them very tenderly. I looked at the bundle (the stuff); I had seen it before.

When the woman thought that she had told all there was to tell, she sat down. She said: "I am so poor now, that I have nothing to offer you. We are starving, you know.– But you said you knew my son. Where did you get to know him? And you said he told you to visit me, Did he say anything about me? At the time he didn't know that his father was dead. Did he speak about him?”

She overwhelmed me with questions. I sat and stared at the picture. I really had thought of Karl in a different way. I didn't want it to be true that he had been looking like this. The mother saw my silence.

I said: "I saw him in a transport, it was a hospital transport." I lied: "One of them threw a slip of paper out of the train. On the paper he asked to send regards to his mother. I picked up the paper, memorized the address but I don't have the paper anymore." The woman asked me if I was a soldier too.

"No", I said," I was... a civilian."

"He was a good boy", the old lady said again and again, "you know, a good boy. Today he would be a support to me."

I looked at the old woman and also thought of other mothers whose dead or killed sons could be their support today.

As I visited her, I had had no plan what to say to the old woman. It had been the curiosity, it had been the wish to get rid of an experience – an experience that, since I was a free man again, had often haunted my sleepless nights.

Now I was here and didn't know what to say. One thing I knew, I couldn't tell this poor woman the truth. Why should one rob her of a belief which was so vital to her. What would be the good of that.

I told her nothing of that which I knew. I repeated once more the lie about the slip of paper from the hospital train.

* * *

A hot September day in 1942. We are marching to a new working place of the Concentration Camp in Lemberg. They had put together

a cleaning crew (garbage disposal crew). This morning I was ordered to join them. Russian deputy policemen and some SS-men were escorting us.

The road along Janowskastreet leads past a soldier's cemetery. Sunflower after sunflower stands upright on each grave. I am marching and I can't take my eyes off the sunflowers. Every dead man beneath those sunflowers seems to me like one, who, in the depth of the ocean, catches takes in the world outside with a periscope. And so, the dead soldier has over the sunflower links a connection with the world the dead soldier with the world.

I am thinking of the mass grave that is expecting awaiting me and the others. I can see that the other prisoners also cannot take their eyes off the flowers. Still I don't know where we are going. The column turns and now we are on Sapiehy Street and soon we are at the College of Technology where I had been studying and getting my diploma. Everything seems so unreal to me. I, in my torn and tattered KZ-clothes, find myself all of a sudden standing in the courtyard of the Technical College. I had been studying there for four years. Countless antisemitic excesses with Polish students come back into my memory. "Day without Jews” when we wanted to go to the exams were about to take the examinations organized to defeat us (with all the cards stacked against us!

And now I am standing here with a shovel and am loading a wagon with bloody bandages and puss-drenched cotton and other garbage. The College of Technology has become a hospital for hundreds of wounded soldiers. The sharp smell of medicines mixes with the stench of decaying arms and legs. A Red Cross sister approaches

and asks me:

"Are you a Jew?"

I nod.

She says: "Follow me."

I think she wants me to follow her because she has a piece of bread or something else for me.

She leads me to the back staircase and from there up to the first floor to a small room which used to belong to the Dean of the Department of Architecture, the very department where I graduated.

I stop at the door.

The situation is not clear to me. She calls me into the room. I can only see something white. A white face. When I come nearer, I see chalky white hands on top of the bed cover, an entirely bandaged face with little openings around mouth and ears.

The sister whispers to the wounded man and then I hear his voice.

"Please come nearer, I can't speak loud."

The door closes behind the sister.

I feel uneasy. The wounded man is holding my hand.

I sit down.

"I won't live much longer and I asked the sister to find me a Jew. She told me that there are Jews working at the garbage disposal. My name is Karl...... I was a volunteer of the Waffen-SS.

I must tell you a terrible story. I know since a year that the thing I have done was inhuman. But I have to tell you about it."

Was there anything inhuman of which I had not heard already?

I looked into the bandages of his head but I could not see his eyes. What I saw was the sunflower. He will have a sunflower, I thought.

I sat in silence.

He asked if I could follow him. He told me a lot of his childhood, it was like a confession. Of the friends with whom he played, of the Hitler-youth, of his enthusiasm. He told me how he had volunteered for the army, how he had gone to the war as to a festival.

First the war with Poland. It was a description of the [sic]

I sat as on coals.

It seemed to me like a macabre joke that I, the Jew who was destined to be killed, should be kind of confessor of an SS-man.

His hand didn't let me go. I was for him the means by which he wanted to accomplish something before he died. I felt it, something terrible was going to come.

Again and again he interrupted himself, breathing heavily, apparently forgetting that I was there.

I tried to slip my hand out of his. but he gripped it harder. He started to speak again.

In my mind I lived through my own confession. I also saw back into my youth, I too remembered my childhood friends. I don't know how and why. The words he spoke mixed with my own thoughts.

Then he told of the war with the Soviet Union, told about the truck-loads of books which "Der Stürmer" sent to them, told of the conversations in the SS canteens. – Now they were going to smoke

out the "subhumans". Great perspectives were opening up before them. Karl told of it with bitterness.

I saw in front of me the long hospital trains. Were they all boys like Karl, those soldiers, tiding back home or behind the front? I asked myself.

He was quiet again. I forgot where I was.

Flies, allured into the room by the smell of medicines and puss, were humming. Around the head of the invalid, too. I chased the flies away. He felt it although he could not see. He said: "Thank you." It was a relief to him.

And then he told on. I felt that he was collecting his strength to tell me something terrible.

“With great rejoicing did we arrive at Dniepropetrowsk. Everywhere abandoned cars, abandoned canons. The Russians were leaving in hast. And when we were inside, whole blocks of houses exploded. We had many dead, many wounded. There came all of a sudden on a truck a Hauptsturmführer, he spoke with the chief of our troops, we went into formation and reached into another part of the city.

I saw a group of people standing there. At first I didn't know who they were. Only later I found out that they were Jews. We got the order to drive them into a house and we did. Then there came a truck and brought cans with gasoline. We carried them into the house to the Jews. It was a three story building. There were about 150 to 200 Jews in the house.

We waited outside. Still we didn't know what was going to happen. Then came some men from a "Rollkommando" and joined us. The time of waiting was shortened for us through a supply of brandy.

The bottle went from mouth to mouth and then came…"

He interrupted again.

A portion of rum was distributed. When the shelling had finished, it was our turn to go. I jumped out of our trench and joined all the others running towards the Russian lines. Suddenly I saw something, very distant, very small... It was the family, the family from Dniepropetrowsk – all aflame.

I stood rooted in the ground. In this moment, a grenade exploded quite near. It tore up my face.

I am being dragged from field-hospital to field-hospital. Why on earth don't they send me home? Nothing shortens my pain. For a long time I was unconscious. But as soon as I awoke and became aware of my condition I always thought back to that event. Now I have been in this hospital in Lemberg, since three months, and I know I won't make it much longer. And I don't mind. But

what is really bad is, I feel I can't die. I know that I bear a great guilt; for what were these poor people guilty of? I am young, just 22, and am now to end my life with such a horror. As a child I felt very much drawn to God. My comrades in the Hitler-Youth often ridiculed me and called me a religious fanatic.

I don't want to die without getting this straight. A confession you'd call it. But what is a confession? A confession is a letter yet unanswered."

I said nothing.

The horrors of which he spoke were then so frequent in so many parts of Europe that they had almost become monotonous. Each dreadful report was worse than the last. Here I found myself facing a man, a murderer, who didn't want to be a murderer and who wanted to confide his crime to me, a Jew. His words indicated real repentance. How many such killers was I still to confront, today, tomorrow...? And for how much longer?

Karl continued to speak.

"Believe me, words cannot express my yearning to undo what I have done. So many young people are being killed on the battlefields. Why should this burden me. But as for you, I don't know who you are. As far as I am concerned, you are a Jew, and if you are a Jew, then you are suffering."

I kept silent. I, too, envisioned this burning family which he had described, jumping to their death from a window in Dniepropetrowsk. I felt a part of them, felt a participant in their ghostly appearance before the tranches of Taganrog, an apparition which could cause an SS-man not to seek cover against an

oncoming grenade.

"I want to die in peace, but for that I need..." He stopped.

Not till then did I notice that I was no longer holding his hand. When he had begun telling about Dniepropetrowsk I had withdrawn it. Now I noticed that he was reaching out for me. I moved closer to the bed.

"I know I have told you something terrible. Through long nights, while waiting for death, I wanted and wanted to tell this to a Jew and ask his forgiveness. I know that I'm asking for much, for very much. But if you could forgive me, then I would die in peace. It's the only thing I now desire."

You could hear a pin drop.

Suddenly I began to see clearly. This fateful war had brought together two people. One of them wanted to die but couldn't, because he felt haunted by his terrible crime. The other had to die but didn't want to because he wanted to live to see the criminals vanquished. Without a word I got up and left the room. I went down the stairs and out through the main gate, just as I had done for four years while studying at this college. I didn't notice that I wore prison garb with the Concentration Camp number. I saw soldiers, I saw doctors in white coats, I saw medics and nurses. Before I knew it I was outside in the courtyard. The group with which I had come was eating lunch. I still managed to get a cup of soup. But my thoughts remained with the dying SS-man. At five o'clock in the afternoon we marched back. Again we marched through Janowska Street, once more I saw the military cemetery, once more the sunflowers. How eager I was for them.

I thought: By tomorrow Karl will have his sunflower.

I thought: By tomorrow Karl will have his sunflower. By then I may be lying in a mass grave, if today the order comes to liquidate the barracks in which I live in the camp, or maybe all of us.

In the evening I told this story to a friend. But there was not much time for philosophizing. "Be glad that there is one less", he said. Was I glad? I felt confused.

The next day I tried to persuade one of the guards to assign me to another group. I was told that in a few days I would be going back to my old job on the railroad. We were told that we would be in this camp only for a few days for new registration. But my attempt proved futile, and I found myself back with the garbage crew. Again my column moved past the sunflowers, and again I was back in the yard of the Technical College. The nurse who had asked me the day before came out again. She didn't recognize me immediately.

First she talked to others and then she came towards me.

"Please come with me."

I was really afraid. I felt unable to listen to further confessions of this type. But we only stepped into the doorway. She apparently didn't know what was at issue. She only said: "The soldier you saw yesterday died during the night. He asked me to give you all his possessions with the exception of his watch and a few photos which I am supposed to send to his mother. Here is the bundle."

She wanted to hand it to me but I refused to take it. I didn't even want to touch it. I said:

"I don't need this stuff, nurse. Send it all to his mother." The nurse looked at me without saying anything and went away.

I returned to my group.

In 1945, when I was living in the death section of the Concentration Camp Mauthausen, waiting for death, I remembered this episode. I had plenty of time to remember: I had been starving since two months and looked like a skeleton.

I kept asking myself whether I had acted properly, but I found no answer.

Years passed, I was free. Sometimes, when visiting a hospital and seeing nurses and doctors, or people with bandaged heads, I think back of Karl. I see him, but alive. I had seen his picture on the wall, I had seen his mother and had not been able to contradict her when she said that he had been a good boy. He had been that as a child. A merciless time made him a killer.

Could I have forgiven him? I am still not sure. The man showed regret. Was he able in his life to make up for his wrongdoing? Was I entitled to refuse the last wish of a dying man? Was I entitled to forgive him in the name of those no longer living?....

I wrote to well-known philosophers of various religious denominations asking them to answer according with the principles of their religions: How should I have behaved in this case?