Kinga Frojimovics, Florine Miez and Marianne Windsperger

“The Sunflower” in Simon Wiesenthal’s Writing

When Simon Wiesenthal began working on “The Sunflower” in the late 1960s, he had already authored and edited numerous books related to his work as a documentator of Nazi crimes, for example “KZ Mauthausen. Bild und Wort“ (Linz/Vienna, 1946), “Ich jagte Eichmann. Tatsachenbericht” (Gütersloh, 1961) and “Doch die Mörder leben” (München/Zürich 1967; in English “The Murderer Among Us”, 1967). In addition, Simon Wiesenthal was also part of the editorial committee of the “Sefer Buczacz. Matsevet Zikaron le-kehila kedosha” (Tel Aviv, 1956), the yizkor book (memorial book) of Wiesenthal’s hometown Buczacz in which we can find his account “Birthday in a concentration camp” set in the Janowska concentration camp that plays a key role in “The Sunflower”. Most of his authored books are framed as autobiographical narrations.

Already in the publication from 1946, “KZ Mauthausen. Bild und Wort”, we can find a motto that reflects the central theme of “The Sunflower”: “O Lord, do NOT forgive them because they KNEW what they were doing!” (“O Herr, vergib ihnen NICHT, weil sie WUSSTEN, was sie tun!”). Wiesenthal’s edited volume “Verjährung?” published in 1965 is an important predecessor to “The Sunflower” where he introduced the topic and the debate of the statute of limitations for Nazi crimes through quoting Robert F. Kennedy: “Moral obligations have no time limits.” (“Moralische Verpflichtungen haben keine Termingrenzen.”) With this book, Wiesenthal established his concept of getting into conversation with public intellectuals through letters, petitions or and accounts which he sent out asking for reactions or written statements.

The Narrative of “The Sunflower”

In “The Sunflower” the narrator takes us back to his time in Janowska concentration camp in the early 1940s and to his experiences as a forced laborer. During one of Wiesenthal’s work deployments outside of the camp, a nurse addresses him and leads him to the sickbed of a dying person. This person – a wounded SS soldier named Karl – begins to tell his story, how he has committed crimes against Jewish citizens and now asks Simon Wiesenthal for forgiveness. Wiesenthal listens to what he has to say and then leaves, without forgiving this dying man.

In the published version of the book, the core narration is introduced through the frame narrative of a conversation the narrator Simon Wiesenthal has with his friends Arthur and Josek in the Janowska camp. Both friends represent different forms of storytelling – presumably alter egos of Simon Wiesenthal. Josek is called “rabbi”, his form of expression is through legends and anecdotes that have a transtemporal meaning. Arthur on the other hand is a writer and lawyer, he is described as a friend who is “foresighted”. Through his contacts and conversations, he has information from outside of the camp, rumors and news that are circulating in the ghetto, whereas Simon Wiesenthal describes himself as purely existing in the present, in survival mode. A very different frame story that moves from this scene of collective storytelling to an account of Wiesenthal himself can be found in the synopsis document published in this online edition.[1] In this version Simon Wiesenthal visits the SS soldier's mother in Southern Germany after the war in 1946, sees a picture of him in her living room that takes him back to the scene three years earlier, at the soldier’s sickbed in Lemberg.

The Historical Background of “The Sunflower”

The narrative is closely linked to four historical places, first and foremost to the Janowska camp. Yet, in contrast to the narrative, Wiesenthal’s experience at the Janowska camp does not appear explicitly in his ego-documents, e.g. in his English language Curriculum Vitae dated 25 May 1945, sent to the U.S. Camp Commander of Camp Mauthausen. Even though Simon Wiesenthal does not name Janowska as a location there, he highlights his work in a railroad shop in Lemberg in the years 1941 to 1943 in a central passage of the document: “It was during this time that my life was several times placed in extreme danger and that I lost both of my parents who were killed by the Nazis. […] It was only through working in the railroad shop that I managed to survive in the end.”[2] This corresponds to the characteristics of the Janowska camp by historian Waitman Wade Beorn, who stated: “Janowska defies simple categorization because of its hybrid nature as slave labor camp, transit camp, and dedicated killing site. Notably and unusually, it functioned simultaneously in these roles.”[3]

Located on the outskirts of Lwów (134 Janowska Street), the camp was opened on 1 August 1941 as a labour camp of the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke (DAW, German Equipment Factory). By the end of 1941, more than 550 Jews had been forced to work in the camp, which was guarded by SS and Ukrainian militia (Askaris) under the rival leadership of SS Obersturmführer Fritz Gebauer and SS-Untersturmführer Gustav Willhaus. By March 1942, Willhaus was appointed commander of a new camp, the Zwangsarbeitslager-Janowska (ZAL-J), which was set up in the immediate vicinity of Gebauer's DAW camp. The two camps were separated by a barbed wire fence. While Gebauer's DAW camp functioned mainly as a war factory (prisoners produced building materials and clothes for the army), Willhaus' camp sent its inhabitants in labour brigades to various industrial and other facilities in Lwów for forced labour. Simon Wiesenthal, for example, worked for the Reichsbahn. At Zwangsarbeitslager-Janowska, various estimates put the number of prisoners who lived in the camp for shorter or longer periods at between 8,000 and 18,000.

Janowska also functioned as a transit camp where Jews from the Lwów ghetto and other ghettos in the area were first selected. Those unfit for work were deported to Bełzec. At the same time, inmates were constantly murdered in Janowska. Willhaus, for example, was fond of holding so-called 'Death Races', which meant that prisoners had to run between the guards' cordons while being constantly beaten with sticks and rifle butts. The sick and weakened camp inmates, condemned to death, were taken to a separate part of the camp, where they were left to starve and die of thirst in the open air for days on end. Those who survived were shot. On several occasions, members of the Janowska guard took part in the liquidation of surrounding ghettos and other camps. For example, according to Wiesenthal, in the summer of 1943, when SS man Adolf Kolonko, who had served in Janowska, took part in the liquidation of the Jaworów subcamp, during which prisoners were herded into a barrack, which was then set on fire.[4] The survivors of the action were transported to Janowska as forced labourers. Janowska's prisoners were constantly informed of such and similar actions by Jews brought in from the surrounding areas. Janowska figured prominently in survivor accounts, artworks, testimonies, photo collections, and memoirs published after the war.[5]

In this edition we publish an interview by USHMM with Janowska survivor and official camp photographer Herman Lewinter, in which he explained the context of his photograph collection of the Janowska concentration camp: “I was also in the Janowska Road camp […] I was a photographer in the camps. The Nazis ordered me to go around the camp and snap at anything what I see.” His pictures were used as evidence during the Nuremberg trials, although he himself never testified at the trials. In the interview he states that he also sent to “a batch of pictures” to Wiesenthal. Within Herman Lewinter’s collection we can furthermore find photographs of musicians in the camp. They were also depicted by Zeev Porath in his drawings from 1943, which are also part of this edition.[6] In his correspondence about "The Sunflower", Wiesenthal repeatedly referred to the fact that what he had written in the book was in fact also known to another person, the only survivor besides himself of the same barrack in Janowska, engineer Zeev Porath (born as Wilhelm Ochs, 1909-1991) who after the war became the director of the Tel Aviv Municipality's architecture department and testified against war criminals in several trials. In the 1960s, Porath and Wiesenthal corresponded intensively, above all about the ongoing Galicia trials.

Besides the Janowska camp, Dnipropetrovsk is another central place in the narrative of “The Sunflower”: The young SS-soldier confesses to Wiesenthal that he was involved in an action in Dnipropetrovsk where Jews were driven into a house, had to drag gasoline cans in there themselves and then burnt to death by the grenades thrown into the house by Karl and other SS soldiers. The archival evidence on this event in the Simon Wiesenthal Archive is rather scarce, however, an incident that could be the one described in “The Sunflower” and evidence of similar events, the burning of Jews locked into buildings by the SS in Dnipropetrovsk can be found in the Yekaterinoslav-Dnepropetrovsk Memorial Book and in the documents related to the crimes committed by the Wachtbataillon 171 in Dnipropetrovsk collected by Simon Wiesenthal.[7]

The third place that is closely connected to “The Sunflower” is Linz. After his liberation from in Mauthausen in the spring of 1945, Wiesenthal became one of thousands of Jewish survivors who did not return to their former home but went to displaced persons camps to wait for their chance to leave Europe. He wrote about this period in “The Sunflower” as follows: “For me there was no home to return to. Poland was a cemetery and if I were to make a new life I couldn’t start it in a cemetery […] So soon after the liberation I joined a commission for the investigation of Nazi crimes. Years of suffering had inflicted deep wounds on my faith that justice existed in the world. It was impossible for me simply to re-start my life from the point at which it had been so ruthlessly disrupted. I thought the work of the commission might help me regain my faith in humanity and in the things which mankind needs in life besides material.”[8] More than 90 of Wiesenthal's relatives died in the Holocaust, but his wife Cyla survived. The couple met again in Linz in 1945, and although their situation had returned to some degree of normality, Wiesenthal was jolted back to recent events in the most unexpected places and situations. One such memory is captured in the book: sometime in the summer of 1946, he went hiking in the mountains around Linz with his wife and their friends. Settling in a meadow, Wiesenthal suddenly saw a field of sunflowers, “and at once I became lost in thought. I remembered the soldiers’ cemetery at Lemberg, the hospital and the dead SS man on whose grave a sunflower would now be growing…”[9] At the beginning of his years in Linz, Wiesenthal, who was very conscious of documenting everything systematically, produced a map of the Jewish mass graves in Austria entitled “Map of the Jewish mass-graves and conc. camps-cemeteries in Austria” which is still an essential source for research into the various death marches through Austria.

Following the aforementioned trip to the Linz area in 1946, when Wiesenthal unexpectedly saw a field of sunflowers that reminded him of Karl and the events in Lemberg, Wiesenthal recounts that he travelled to Munich a few days later. In the narration he combined this trip with a visit to the widowed mother of Karl, the dying SS soldier in the book, in Stuttgart. Twenty years later – and before writing “The Sunflower” in 1966, Wiesenthal was in Stuttgart to testify in the so-called Galicia (or Lemberg) Trial, in which 17 defendants were tried for war crimes committed in Galicia. Wiesenthal, who had been very active in collecting data on the perpetrators, testified in December 1966 about the atrocities committed in Lwów and especially in Janowska.[10]     

The Making of the Book

Wiesenthal began working on the publication of the book in 1968 with Charles Ronsac (1908-2001), editor of the Opera Mundi publishing house in Paris. Their concept was that the book, originally intended to be published in several languages, would consist of two complementary parts: “The Sunflower” story, written by Wiesenthal, and the commentaries on it by invited contributors. Ronsac drew up lists of invited commentators by country. He also included publishers from various countries in the list, countries that he hoped would publish the book. Opera Mundi sent the manuscript of “The Sunflower” (in German, English or French) to the people on the lists, together with a cover letter signed by Wiesenthal. However, very few of the invited commentators replied, and many sent such short and general responses that they could not be published. Wiesenthal therefore tried to gain more contributors himself, but was not very successful at that. By the turn of 1968/69, the publication of the book was therefore in jeopardy.

From then on, instead of a general circular letter, Wiesenthal wrote more specific, tailor-made invitations to certain individuals. However, it was not always successful and public personalities like Elie Wiesel (1928–2016), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) or Heinrich Böll (1917–1985) refused a contribution for different reasons as the documents in this edition show. Nevertheless, enough comments were finally received, and the book was then published in 20 editions and 16 translations since 1969.[11] The answers and contributors vary from edition to edition and from language to language, depending on the personal background of the contributors. Jewish religious leaders answered the question differently to Christian ones; survivors judged differently to bystanders or perpetrators. In most of the answers, the dilemma of whether it is even possible to forgive on behalf of others takes center stage.

Even though “The Sunflower” was a very ambitious and successful project by Simon Wiesenthal, which brought him an even larger and more international audience than ever before as well as a growing reputation as a moral authority, the history and the contexts of the book remain partially unexplored. Possible reasons are on the one hand the hybrid nature of the narration on the verge of documentation and literature that often led to doubts about the authenticity of Wiesenthal’s experiences in the Janowska camp. On the other hand, the criticism of a lack of literary quality, which was prominently expressed by the German writer Heinrich Böll, for example.[12] In anthologies and handbooks on Holocaust literature and/or Jewish literature, however, Wiesenthal’s “The Sunflower” is listed among the key texts of Holocaust literature alongside Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl”, Primo Levi’s “Survival in Ausschwitz” and Elie Wiesel’s “Night”.[13] Through the publication of largely unknown sources, this EHRI online edition seeks to ensure a greater significance of the book within Holocaust studies.

The Afterlife of the Book

The publication of “The Sunflower” in its various language editions was frequently reviewed. Simon Wiesenthal and his team thus collected critiques and reactions in the press meticulously. From the many newspaper articles that followed the first editions of the book, you can find examples published in German, English and Italian-language newspapers in this online edition. Furthermore, individuals like Kardinal König, Archbishop of Vienna, wrote letters to Simon Wiesenthal. In his letter, König clearly refers to Simon Wiesenthal’s suffering as a Jewish prisoner and his limited agency, an answer to the question if Wiesenthal was right not to forgive is relegated to the realm of the Divine/God, stating that “an explicit apology would probably have been almost superhuman”.[14] Some of these reactions as well as the missing translation or the non-reception of Simon Wiesenthal's “The Sunflower” in Hebrew show how much Wiesenthal was addressing a non-Jewish (Christian) audience with this book. Living in Austria in the 1970s with many perpetrators still alive and active, often in leading positions, Wiesenthal was regularly confronted with the fact that the people he dealt with on a daily basis were involved in World War II in one way or another. Among German-speaking survivors in Israel, the question of forgiveness for Nazi perpetrators was not discussed; instead, survivors and their descendants had to deal with their trauma and with survivor's guilt, as the review in “Jedioth Chadaschoth” in this online edition shows.

Wiesenthal's book also triggered a discussion about guilt and forgiveness in schools: The question of morality was debated in school classes and universities from the 1980s onwards. Particularly in the USA, but also in Germany and Italy, students in religion and history classes grappled with the question and wrote Wiesenthal letters with their thoughts. He collected the correspondence with those students from 1981 to 2003, from which we present a few examples in this edition. In their letters, the pupils explain the pros and cons of potential forgiveness, take a stand on the moral dilemma and try to put themselves in Wiesenthal's shoes. In their answers, some of the students argue that Wiesenthal should have forgiven the SS man. But for the most part, they judge his actions as appropriate to the situation. As with the answers of the intellectuals in the book itself, the pupils' answers differ mainly in terms of their respective religious backgrounds.

To this day, the book is part of a wide variety of religious education and school curricula, and it can be also found on social media. Rabbi Raps (self-described as “Rabbi, Film Maker & Motivational Speaker. The TikTok Rebbe”) for example discusses the book in a short video from 2022 on TikTok, asking the question, “Do you think Simon should have forgiven the officer or not?”, which received hundreds of responses.[15] The book has also inspired many film and theatre performances even though Wiesenthal was not very open to interpreting his book in other artistic genres.[16]

In the 1990s, the context of Holocaust research in the Western world changed increasingly. What had previously been a separate field of research became a slice of a wider phenomenon, the genocide studies. A clear manifestation of this was a major conference entitled “Should Great Crimes Against Humanity Be Forgiven? The Challenge of Reconciliation and Justice in the 21st Century”, planned for 1999 in Vienna and organised by the American organisation State of the World Forum. In the conference proposal they stated: “Reconciliation and forgiveness have become major global issues. […] Inspired by the question of forgiveness raised by Simon Wiesenthal in his book, ‘The Sunflower’, the State of the World Forum plans to convene a conference […] to look at the deeper aspects of reconciliation and forgiveness. The conference will focus on the issues of apologies requested, forgiveness given, justice demanded and reconciliation extended as it is affecting those in regions such as Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Guatemala and Cambodia; in institutions such as the Catholic Church on the issue of anti-semitism; the Swiss banks with regard to repayment for Jewish accounts confiscated during World War II; and as it relates to the U.S. experience of slavery and exploitation of its indigenous peoples.”[17] Although this conference did not take place in the end, Wiesenthal's book became an integral part of this expanded discourse.

The Sunflower as a Metaphor for the Holocaust

From the beginning of the reception history of Simon Wiesenthal’s book, the metaphor of the sunflower was addressed in the reactions by the authors as well as in book reviews in the press. In Wiesenthal’s narrative, the sunflower functions as a trope for the dividing line between the perpetrators that are either still alive or had been buried properly in graves with (sun)flowers and those victims of the Holocaust that had been shot and buried in massgraves, often in unknown locations without the possibility of closure and commemoration. It can be counted to the metaphors of the Holocaust that put into language and image the unlikeliness of survival and the liminal space between life and death that surviving and living-on meant. Metaphors draw upon lived experiences, when we turn to the reality outside of the story, sunflowers are widely spread in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and Ukraine where this story is set. The sunflower appears in artwork about the Holocaust and the Second World War, for example the paintings by the Romani Holocaust survivor Ceija Stojka, the movie based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel “Everything is Illuminated” (directed by Liev Schreiber, 2005), in the 1969 movie “Les Fleurs du soleil” with Sophia Loren (directed by Vittoria De Sica, 1969) and in Anselm Kiefer’s artwork, just to name a few.

[1] See the document in part A in this edition. Link to the document Simon Wiesenthal’s Synopsis for “The Sunflower” (doc. 1.1., Part A, VWI-SWA,II.1A.II.6.1).

[2] See the document in part A in this edition. Link to the document Curriculum Vitae of Ing. Wiesenthal, Szymon (25 May, 1945), VWI-SWA,II.1A.II.6.1.

[3] Waitman Wade Beorn, “Last Stop in Lwów: Janowska as a Hybrid Camp.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 32, no. 3 (2018): 445–71. https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcy041. 446.

[4] Simon Wiesenthal statement, 6 June 1961, Stadtarchiv Linz, EL 317 III, Bü 1523, 197.

[5] See for example the testimonies by Leon Weliczker Wells, Helen Kaplan, Julie Keefer, David Kahane, Reuven Rimer and Zeev Porath.

[6] See the drawings in Part A in this edition.

[7] See Sefer Yekaterinoslav-Dnepropetrovsk (Yekaterinoslav-Dnepropetrovsk memorial book), edited by Zvi Harkavi, Yaakov Goldburt and published by Yekaterinoslav-Dnepropetrovsk Society, Jerusalem-Tel Aviv 1973 (https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/ekaterinoslav/Ekaterinoslav.html#TOC89); see also the document in part A in the edition: Letter by Simon Wiesenthal to the Austrian Ministry of Interior about the crimes committed by the Wachbataillon 171 in Dnepropetrovsk attaching an excerpt of a memoir of a former member, 1964, VWI-SW, I.1.691_Dnepropetrovsk.

[8] Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower (London: W. H. Allen, 1970): 85–86.

[9] Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, 86.

[10] See the documents of part A in the edition.

[11] See “Book Editions of Simon Wiesenthal´s ´The Sunflower` in chronological order”, and the “List of Contributors”.

[12] The historian and biographer Tom Segev agrees with Böll’s critical comment See Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal. The Life and Legends (New York: Doubleday, 2010): 229–240.  

[13] See for example John K. Roth (Ed.), Holocaust Literature (2 volumes) (Pasadena, CA/ Hackensack, NJ: Salem Press, 2008); Ari Kohen and Gerald Steinacher, From Student to Citizen: The Impact of Personal Narratives in University-Level Genocide Education. In: DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2020, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1232&context=historyfacpub

[14] The letter was then published in the “Ausweg”, the journal of the BJVN, and then included in the subsequent German language editions of “The Sunflower”. See the document in part B of the edition.

[15] See https://www.tiktok.com/@rabbiraps/video/7150356296510885163?lang=eng.

[16] See for example a screenplay written by Edmund B. Gerard in 1975 (VWI.SWA.II.1.A-II.6.19), a BBC proposal from 1982 (VWI.SWA.II.1.A-II.6 .20), and a dramatised reading text by Emmerich Schäffer entitled On guilt and forgiveness (Von Schuld und Vergebung) (VWI.SWA.II.1.A-II.6.21).

[17] Proposal of the Conference “Should Great Crimes against Humanity Be Forgiven?” which was never realised, 1999, VWI-SWA, II.1A.VIII.36.3