The Sunflower

On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

By Simon Wiesenthal

Schocken 271 pp. $24

Reviewed by David Chanoff

Jesuit spiritual masters teach the art of imaginative projection. Close your eyes, they tell retreatants, and project yourself into the scenes of Christ's life. Hear the jeers of the crowd as Jesus stumbles along the Via Dolorosa. Smell the rankness. See the contorted faces, the worn paving, a flash of blue sky. Feel the gouge of thorns and the trickle of blood down the forehead, the weight on the shoulders of the rough wooden cross.

It’s unlikely that Simon Wiesenthal ever made the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, but he surely traveled his own personal Via Dolorosa through half a dozen World War II Nazi concentration camps. In "The Sunflower" he asks us to make our own mental projection and experience some of that along with him. More specifically, he asks readers to imagine that they are in his place for one single encounter that he, a condemned Jew, had with a young SS Uebermensch on the edge of his own extinction.

It happened in Lviv where Wiesenthal as a camp inmate in 1942. Marched with his labor gang to shovel out the refuse of a German military hospital, he is taken inside by a nurse who leads him to a room where a blinded, skeleton-like soldier lies at death’s door. When the dying German says he is an SS man, Wiesenthal winces and tries to leave. But the soldier pleads with him to stay, then launches into a strange and terrible confession.

One incident, he tells Wiesenthal, has tortured his conscience ever since it happened. Before he dies, he has to unburden himself, to a Jew. It’s the only way he can possibly relieve some of the anguish in his heart over what he has done. As Wiesenthal listens, the SS man describes how in the town of Dnepropetrovsk his unit was ordered to kill a group of Jews, mostly women, children and old people—how they forced the strongest to carry cans of gasoline into an empty house, how they then drove all of them into the house and sealed the door, how they lobbed grenades through the windows, and how they-he, too—shot down those who tried to escape. The whole scene has been burning in his mind ever since, particularly the sight of a family who had jumped from a window in front of him, a father, mother and little boy with black hair and big dark eyes. Wiesenthal sits through the recitation like a cat on a hot tin roof, then listens as the German whispers a last plea for forgiveness. He understands that what he has heard has been a true confession and true contrition, but he says nothing. Finally he stands up and walks out, silent. Despite the horrors he lived through, this encounter troubled Wiesenthal’s own conscience for years, even after his eventual liberation. Just imagine, he asks readers at the end of his story, that you had been in my place listening to that soldier. What would you have done? When Schocken first published "The Sunflower" in 1976, Wiesenthal’s editors put that query to a group of eminent Christian and Jewish theologians, scholars, and writers. Their responses turned “The Sunflower" from a book into a symposium, and it quickly became a leading classroom tool for studying the Holocaust.

Now Schocken has put out a new edition. It includes several of the original responses along with more than 30 new ones from a galaxy of commentators that includes the Dalai Lama, Cambodian survivor Dith Pran, Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles and Chinese dissident Harry Wu. This new "Sunflower" offers a storehouse of thoughtful and provocative essays on the problem of guilt and forgiveness. I suspect it will also take its place as a unique cultural yardstick. Together with its predecessor, the book marks the temper of two eras, telling us something about where we were morally and psychologically 20 years ago, how far we may have come since then (if we have), and where we might possibly be headed.

That seems important. In the 20 years since the first "Sunflower" the world has witnessed Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. We are still digesting the destruction of tens of millions by Stalin and we’ve only just begun to register the even vaster numbers done to death by Mao. Strangely, in the midst of all this, the Holocaust still somehow seems sui generis—the combination of lethal racism and industrial technology is a peculiarly satanic brew. But there’s no question that in two decades our notion of the human condition has darkened considerably. In these circumstances, the dilemma of guilt and forgiveness seems more topical than ever and more urgent. One of the recent respondents, Catholic Holocaust scholar Eva Fleischner, reports that in many years of using "The Sunflower" as a Holocaust text she’s seen a striking division among her students. Almost without exception, her Christian students think Wiesenthal should have found some way to forgive the contrite SS man. Her Jewish students have thought otherwise. Actually, that same split was evident among the earlier set of respondents – those who answered for the 1976 edition. Most of the Christians, especially the churchmen, dwelled on the obligation to forgive: Few of the Jews wanted anything to do with it.

Twenty years later, though, there’s been a subtle shift in the tenor of many respondents' answers. The dangers of “cheap grace," Paul Tillich's term, seem much more on the minds of the Christian theologians these days than it was then. “Dare we forgive Karl [the SS man]?" asks Harry James Cargas, a Catholic scholar on the executive board of the Catholic Center for Holocaust studies. “I cannot. God have mercy on my soul."

Some, like Eva Fleischner, ponder what confession without atonement might be worth. Others, the Episcopalian priest Matthew Fox and religion professor Franklin Littell, direct attention to the complicity of Christianity in the Holocaust. You get the sense that Simon Wiesenthal’s dilemma doesn’t interest them as much as the unconfessed and unabsolved sins of clergy and ordinary Christians. “Non-Jews,“ writes Lutheran theologian Martin Marty in an essay retained from the earlier volume but more representative of the new one, “and perhaps especially Christians should not give advice about Holocaust experience to its heirs for the next two thousand years. And then we shall have nothing to say.” Maybe there are things, some of these Christian commentators seem to be implying, that are outside even the fundamental Christian credo of forgiveness, that have to be treated differently. Perhaps even heartfelt repentance cannot clean the slate, so radically does true evil affect perpetrators, victims, even onlookers.

IN THE NEW EDITION THERE’S ALSO A SHIFT IN TONE among Jewish respondents. The majority still insist that Wiesenthal was right not to forgive, that forgiveness of such things is impossible, especially for one who was not personally a victim, as Wiesenthal was not personally a victim of this SS man's act. But something else is at work too. Deborah Lipstadt, for example, professor of Holocaust studies at Emory, focuses on the process of teshuvah, repentance. Whether this particular SS man performed teshuvah is open to question. But could he have? Could any SS man have? The inference is that he could, and, if so, then the dialogue of repentance and forgiveness might have proceeded. Others like Yossi Halevi and Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg make the point that while the evil of the Holocaust was unfathomable and its perpetrators unforgivable, those not involved, the next generations of Germans, for example, do not bear guilt. We must, they seem to be saying, find a way to put a quietus to the past.

That’s the thrust of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s discussion too. Forgiving, says the author of “When Bad Things Happen to Good People," isn’t always something a person does for someone else; it is something that happens inside us, for us. Forgiveness is a way of freeing ourselves, of saying I refuse any longer to give you the power to define my life.

These are, it seems to me, attempts to go beyond, to encapsulate the Holocaust experience without diminishing it or pretending that there really can be a clean slate, “forgiving,“ as one respondent put it, “without forgetting." This has got to be one of the most innately difficult of human endeavors, also one of the most necessary. How do we cordon off anger so that it doesn't consume us? How do we relate to our former enemies, who may have done terrible things to us, but with whom we need to find a way to live?

IF I HAVE ONE BONE TO PICK WITH THE EDITORS OF the new "Sunflower" it is that they did not sufficiently broaden the range of respondents. They will think that is unfair. Two Bosnians are here, a Bulgarian, a Tibetan, a Chinese, a Cambodian, But I miss the voice of Solzhenitsyn or one of his fellow Gulag victims. I miss hearing voices from Native America and Black America. As much as anything. I miss a voice from the new South Africa, where so far the business of witnessing and documenting has taken precedence over punishment and revenge, and where amnesty has become the chosen principle of closure I also particularly miss voices from our own Vietnam era. That war, of course, cannot be compared to the Holocaust. It involved neither unadulterated evil nor anything like pure guilt and innocence. At the same time it was far more complex morally, and the rage it spawned seems bone-deep—witness James Carrolls National Book Award-winning “An American Requiem“ and Paul Hendrickson’s runner-up “The Living and the Dead." To give a lot to hear what John McCain has to say on the subject of guilt and forgiveness, or John Kerry or Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the little napalmed Vietnamese girl (now 30) who embraced retired Air Force colonel and former POW Norm McDaniel at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial last Veterans Day in front of thousands of grieving vets. Maybe the Rev. Marty, Rabbi Kushner and the others are telling us something about this—that true grace doesn't come cheap but that forgiveness is something we eventually have to do, not for anyone else, but for ourselves.

“The Sunflower" is a rich text, a quasi-Biblical parable. It bears reading, not only for its evocation of the Holocaust, but for its power to illuminate our own moral lives.

David Chanoff is author or co-author of several books on the Vietnam War.