THE JERUSALEM POST
JUNE 22, 1976
[First column]
I beg your pardon
THE SUNFLOWER by Simon Wiesenthal. Schocken, New York. 216 pp. $7.95.
Matthew Nesvisky
HOW WOULD YOU respond to a Nazi murderer who begs your forgiveness? This question is the crux of Simon Wiesenthal’s novella “The Sunflower”, and the symposium of some 30 intellectuals, writers, statesmen, Christian and Jewish theologians which is appended to it.
One would suspect the question would not trouble Wiesenthal. He is, after all, the former concentration camp inmate who founded the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna and dedicated 30 years of his life to bringing Nazi criminals to justice. Yet forgiveness is troublesome for him, and for many of those from whom he has sought opinions. This in itself is nothing less than a testimonial to the awesome and continuing havoc wrought by the Holocaust. For in a world of scattered values and shattered absolutes, it seems there is no unequivocal answer to anything, even for some of our best thinkers.
In a suitably clean and unpretentious prose, Wiesenthal relates how he was chosen at random from the ranks of a labour gang to hear the deathbed confession of a repentant SSman. Numbly, the subhuman marked for extermination listens as the superman begs absolution for his part in the genocide of the Jews. The Nazi tells how he grew from a fine Catholic lad into a member Hitler Youth, a volunteer for the SS, and ultimately a participant in the incineration and shooting of old men, women and children. Now mortally wounded and full of regret, he has asked his nurse to bring him a Jew to whom he can unburden his conscience.
The horrified Wiesenthal listens to the entire tale without uttering a word, then he leaves the dying man. Back at camp, Wiesenthal is
[Second column]
assured by his fellow-inmates that he was perfectly right to deny a comforting word to the Nazi. They point out that he has no authority to grant forgiveness on behalf of others, that it is obscene to demand kindness from one who is caught up in the machinery of death. The Nazi should have confessed to a priest of his own religion. Instead, he outrageously tried to manipulate his stereotypical vision of an anonymous Jew.
YET WIESENTHAL wonders if his silence was vindictive, and 30 years later, he finds himself seeking the opinions of some of the leading minds of his generation. His respondents include Rene Cassin, David Daiches, Constantine Fitzgibbon, Hans Habe, Abraham J. Heschel, Jacob Kaplan, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Maritain, Martin E. Marty, Cynthia Ozick and many others. The range of their views is impressive.
The fascination of their opinions is in the revelation of the splintered and often shabby state of modern thought. Some have profound things to say on the nature and meaning of forgiveness. Others just blather. Several exhibit a philosophical removal from this world which amounts to a disdain for reality. Many equivocate. At least one believes that withholding forgiveness from the Nazi is tantamount to becoming a Nazi . Yet another argues that granting a word of absolution is in itself an act of collaboration.
Constantine Fitzgibbon explains why he, very likely, would have strangled the SS man on his deathbed. Abraham Heschel responds with a rather mystical little story of his own. And Cynthia Ozick reveals a stunning analytic power and a staggering literary imagination that for my money makes the book valuable if only for her words.
The entire volume is well worth reading, even if its central problem is fast becoming academic. For there is increasing evidence that the post-war generations are not much troubled about forgiving the Nazi – they are forgetting they ever existed.