Founded by Dr Wilhelm (Zeev) Freyhan

Bulletin of the Association of Former Breslauers and Silesians in Israel e.V., No.29, Ramat Gan

The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal

Published by Hoffmann & Campe, 1970

After the Second World War, after the collapse of the Hitler Empire, Simon Wiesenthal did not turn to a lighter existence that had become normal again. He remained trapped in confrontation with the terrible past and took upon himself the task of searching for the murderers. He founded the Documentation Center of the Federation of Jewish Persecutees in Vienna. He succeeded in tracking down Eichmann and bringing him before the court. His book "And the Murderers Live" is filled with this struggle.

In the book The Sunflower, he confronts himself with his own experience from the time of the haunting events, which he cannot forget. With unsparing honesty, he asks himself whether at the moment he stepped out of the chain of suffering, out of the passivity of the never-ending passion, and was called to action, he had failed.

His deep sense of justice, rooted in Judaism from the very beginning (Abraham's story, Gen.18) "to practise justice and righteousness" could not tolerate that the most terrible crimes go unpunished; but just as unsparingly he questions his conscience. Thus he reports in all simplicity that a nurse took him out of the group of forced labourers and brought him to the hospital to a dying S.S. man.

The dying man's head was bandaged; he could not see his eyes. But he could hear his voice. This S.S. man had to speak before his end, had to confess terrible misdeeds and did not want to go without forgiveness, forgiveness from a Jew, from that group of people he had murdered.

But he, the one who was asked, could not speak, could not answer and could not say any words of forgiveness, even though he had to understand that his conscience had awakened in him.

Wiesenthal tries to come to terms with this attitude by speaking out with some other forced labourers who acquit him. But the experience does not let him go and he confronts himself with the judgement of his contemporaries, the judgement of the world, as to whether he was guilty of not being able to speak a word of forgiveness to the dying man.

He has asked eminent thinkers and writers and they have tried to answer his question fairly; they emphasise that the terrible situation in which the questioner found himself as a forced labourer, the suffering, the constant danger of death, the lurking degradation must be taken into account.

The poet Hagelstange sees in the fact that the dying S.S. man did not want to confess to a priest in accordance with his upbringing, but wanted to make his confession of guilt to a Jew, a deeper repentance, an original Christian one, as he says, for which one might also say a primal human one, it seems to me. Hagelstange understands that the Jewish prisoner and forced labourer could not speak a word of comfort; a conciliatory gesture would have seemed like a betrayal of his own. The theologian Helmut Gollwitzer sees in Wiesenthal's efforts to bring the murderers to justice not vindictiveness, as some might have called it, but he understands that here someone is fighting for justice for the sake of the human future, who also does not feel free of guilt and is moved by the question of divine forgiveness.

Salvador Madariaga, diplomat and writer again sees in the inability to speak a word of forgiveness the reaction of the tribesman. Wiesenthal himself had probably said "Many will condemn me for not making it easier for this repentant murderer to die". So Madariaga judges, the universal man saw the dying man, but the tribesman shut his mouth. "And so the dying man took his (Wiesenthal's) peace with him into death". To me, the distinction between universal and tribal seems like the old Christian prejudice. The theologian Gollwitzer understood Wiesenthal's situation more deeply. It was apparently enough for the S.S. man himself that Wiesenthal listened to his confession without forgiving him. For - did he really expect forgiveness for shooting at people who jumped through the window from a burning house? His last will and testament, according to which his belongings were given to Wiesenthal, shows this.

Kurt von Schuschnigg, who was Austrian Chancellor after the assassination of Dollfuss and who had been in prison since the Nazi invasion and in the K.Z. until the end of the war, gave a different answer. He could not forgive, he said, because how could he forgive something that had happened to others? But it had been human of him to fulfil the last wish, the listening to his words.

The fact that he was able to speak to someone gave the dying man relief. And so this interviewee feels that the book "The Sunflower" casts a gloomy, but also reconciliatory shadow. At the same time, he clearly professes his opposition to the tendency to "forget what has been". For the breakthrough of the animalistic always threatens. Through Schuschnigg we also learn what the title: The Sunflower is all about. This radiant flower was misused in the criminal past to conceal countless K.Z. walls.

The experience from the dark times did not let go of Wiesenthal, so that he went to see the S.S. man's mother after the end of the war. But he let her believe that he had died as the good boy she mourned him as. This acquaintance with the S.S. man's mother makes him wonder why parents who were not infected by the poison of Nazism did not exert the slightest influence? After all, the dying S.S. man said (38): "My father rarely spoke to me anymore. And when he did, he was careful." We find a similar remark in Uwe Johnson's book about the East German cyclist (68):" If only he (the father) had spoken once: But he completely abandoned me to the school and the Hitler shit."

That is why it is important that now, in the year 70, a book like The Sunflower appeared. "Memory is the foundation of civilisation!" is how Herman Kesten, the writer, begins his reply to Wiesenthal. "Without memory we would be insensate idiots. Those who have asked us to forget and forgive everything are asking us to become barbarians!" Wiesenthal's book is such a cultural instrument that keeps consciousness awake and sharpens the conscience and continues the humane life of the human species. So that parents know how to open their mouths and so that young people are not left defenceless at the mercy of an ideology that seizes and poisons them with unrestrained violence and by which everything can be destroyed. Because the danger of "animalism breaking through" exists again and again.

Anni Löwenstein - Ramat Chen