Corriere della Sera Milano

Mar. 10, 1970

The man in brackets

A 21-year-old boy, hit by a grenade, blinded, is dying and asks for forgiveness. He is a criminal soldier, an SS man who a few months ago took part in the massacre of a closed group of Jews, men, women, children locked in a barrack and burned alive. Now it is his turn.

Among the prisoners working around the hospital in Dnepropetrovsk [sic] where the boy is hospitalised is Simon Wiesenthal, the future executioner. A nurse accompanies him to the bedside of the dying man who, torn by remorse, begs to be forgiven by the representative of his victims. Wiesenthal leaves the room in silence: in those circumstances, forgiveness seems to him a betrayal towards his persecuted and slaughtered co-religionists. A sunflower is planted on the grave of the SS.

But remorse has now rubbed off on Wiesenthal, who feels the need to send his account of the bitter episode to political writers, philosophers and theologians all over the world, so that they can help him heal the doubt that torments him: "Was I right to refuse forgiveness to a man (a criminal) on his deathbed? The story, together with the answers of the exceptional gathering of personalities (Marcuse and Primo Levi, Senghor and Gabriel Marcel, Heinemann and Salvador de la Madariaga, Fitzgibbon and Umberto Terracini) was also published in Italy.

We are now not so much interested in discussing the book The Sunflower, ed. Garzanti as we are – as the young people will certainly do – in the basic problem it contains: to what extent is forgiveness licit and possible? Far from the war and the concentration camps, it is all too easy to answer that forgiveness is always due; and it is possibly even easier to point at the historical context of the atrocity of the moment to claim the ruthless necessity of condemnation. Leopold Sedhar Senghor, president of the Republic of Senegal, offers us, in reply to Wiesenthal, a more concrete view of the problem: "I belong to a suffering people, brother of the suffering Jewish people, and I have no difficulty in understanding the torments you have experienced and your refusal to forgive. But as a Christian and as a n* I would have forgiven, I believe, the SS.”

It is a noble belief, even a convincing one: if the spiral of hatred is to be interrupted, the initiative lies with those who first were offended by the persecuted. Retaliation, at any level, only perpetuates the logic of violence. In the case we are examining, however, not even Senghor's most reasonable response can satisfy us. In Dnepropetrotrovsk Wiesenthal denied a word to a man who asked him for a word. This seems to us to be the key to the problem. And having found the key, one quickly realises that it is a false problem.

To us today, the scene between the unyielding victim and the dying torturer seems extracted from an old novel, produced by an exhausted and forgettable culture. Two men who believe in words live a drama made of words. A reciprocal relationship between persecuted and persecutor binds them, reversed, interchangeable, in a context where war, the Lager, the gas chambers have words like race, fatherland, glory, faith, daring as their background. 'Forgiveness' is one of these words: we effortlessly grasp its rhetoric, its patronising content, its hollowness. An emission of voice against millions of tortured, burnt, exterminated men.

Millions of deaths manufactured by words, in a demented universe only thirty years away. We who reject that logic today (without boasting about it or suffering from it), cannot fail to reflect on a simple truth. To believe in words is to bury the concreteness of life under them, to put man in parentheses. This is what the dying SS did, entrusting its remorse (made up of murdered men) to Simon Wiesenthal's voice, this is what Simon Wiesenthal also did, denying the absurd relief and tormenting himself with it.

In conclusion, in Dnepropetrovsk [sic] two men met who believed in the same universe (or were affected by it) and who perpetuated it; one was on the right side, the other on the wrong side. Still, the logic was the same for both and the one who survived brought it forward with coherence. Wiesenthal, as everyone knows and as his book “The Murderers Among Us” proves, is a man who has never forgiven and who, on the contrary, dedicated his life to hunt nazi criminals, to ensure them to the revenge of his people. He continued to believe in the autonomous meaning of words, in Justice instead of in the man.

Giuliano Zincone