A dying Nazi soldier asks for your forgiveness. What would you do? In The Sunflower , Simon Wiesenthal raises that question for readers to wrestle with, and they have been passionately doing so ever since. As a young man imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Wiesenthal was taken one day from his labor brigade to a hospital at the request of Karl, a mortally wounded Nazi soldier. Tormented by the crimes in which he had participated, including the murder of a family with a small child, the SS man wanted to confess to—and if possible, receive absolution from—a Jew.
Must we, can we, forgive the repentant criminal, no matter how heinous the crime? Can we forgive crimes committed against others? What do we owe the victims? Twenty-five years after the Holocaust, Wiesenthal asked leading intellectuals what they would have done in his place. Collected into one volume, their responses became one of the most enduring documents of Holocaust literature and a touchstone of interfaith dialogue.
Questions and Topics for Discussion 1. Why does Wiesenthal dream about the little boy Eli p. A recent graduate of the Czech Technical University in Prague and the Polytechnic Institute in Lvov, he had just begun to work in an architectural office in Lvov when Poland was invaded by the Nazis.
From to , Mr. Wiesenthal was a prisoner in several ghettos and concentration camps, including Buchenwald and Mauthausen. After the war, Mr. In , with thirty other concentration camp survivors, he founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Center, which functioned in the American Zone until , and reopened in Vienna in Its task is to identify and locate Nazi war criminals.
Wiesenthal has been honored with numerous awards for his work, including "Commander of the Order of Orange" in the Netherlands, "Commendatore della Repubblica" in Italy, a gold medal for humanitarian work by the United States Congress, the Jerusalem Medal in Israel, and sixteen honorary doctorates.
Learn More About The Sunflower print. Related Books and Guides. Reading Lolita in Tehran. Janet Wallach. The Family. David Laskin. The Hiding Place. John Sherrill and Corrie Ten Boom. Simon Sebag Montefiore. Dreams from My Father. Barack Obama. Francine Klagsbrun. Nine Parts of Desire. Geraldine Brooks. The First Muslim.
Lesley Hazleton. The Audacity of Hope. The Eichmann Trial. Deborah E. Persepolis 2. In his passion for the rule of law and in other interesting ways, Wiesenthal is a modern-day Moses. The encounter between Karl and Simon harks back to the story of Cain and Abel. The hour of utter helplessness when Simon meets Karl is like the night when Jacob wrestles with the angel: it is one of the searing times in his life when the strength of the man joined with a radical vulnerability.
Simon continued to wrestle with the angel of that hour for a long time to come, and through this book, he invites us into the excruciating heart of the struggle. It speaks out as well for the millions of others who have been massacred by the vicious monsters who have haunted humanity through the ages but never more so than in the last hundred years.
In other words, how have you used the precious time that you were granted, that had been robbed from us? It first appears in the book when Simon and the other inmates are passing a military cemetery in Lemberg. A sunflower is planted on each grave. The bright yellow flower heads draw the sunlight down into the darkness where each soldier is buried. Simon thinks that these dead men are receiving sunlight through the flowers. He also imagines that they are hearing messages whispered by butterflies fluttering from flower to flower.
The sunflowers connect them to the world of the living. I would be buried in a mass grave, where corpses would be buried on top of me. No sunflower would ever bring light into my darkness, and no butterflies would dance upon my dreadful tomb. Simon survived the camps. His book itself is a sunflower, drawing light into the darkness of senseless human suffering. In any case, the book is an invitation to ponder and discuss crucial matters of the human psyche and the religious life.
I shall continue my own attempt at a beginning commentary now, with respect to three psychological and religious realities: confession, silence, and forgiveness. Young Karl tries to confess to Simon, a representative Jew.
What does he confess? His pain. His shame. His fear. His horror at what he has become. He himself has killed Christ. Much of what we do as therapists is listen to the confessions of patients.
Confessions of pain. Confessions of shame and fear. Confessions of self-revulsion. How different is the listening role of the therapist and the priest?
The topic of confession is almost unfathomably deep, is it not? In other words, near the core of every human soul, is there perhaps a profound shell of existential fear and shame? In any case, Karl did indeed die later that same day. And of note, when he first began speaking to Simon, he spoke not of a need for an answer, but of a need to speak, a need to confess.
In each, a person tells his or her painful story, some amalgam of memory and confession, and is listened to carefully, and is thereby freed to die a peaceful death. This book of four stories deals also with four silences:. First and most centrally, the silence of Simon with Karl, ending their encounter.
Fourth, the recurring silence of God in the face of mass human slaughter and suffering. Is it too much to say that The Sunflower may have begun the work of redeeming these silences?
Are these silences amenable to redemption? Needless to say, the fourth silence, the silence of God, has meaning only to a believer. The possibility that it, too, may have a need of redemption makes sense only to a believer, or to a certain subset of uncertain believers…among whom I count myself. Someone longs for a sense of connection and is greeted with silence. We are on familiar territory, are we not? One of the great challenges of self-discipline for the therapist is learning the art of leaving people, the confessors, the sufferers, truly to themselves.
Sometimes this leaving someone to himself means leaving him to struggle with great pain almost entirely on his own. Analytic silence is usually posed in grander healing terms. But perhaps it would be right and wise for us to see it more in terms of suffering and confusion and bewilderment and anger.
If so, he or she is perhaps of little use. Or is the therapist under the same wheels of suffering? Ideally, the therapist alternates between these two positions and keeps knocking on the door of the human and helpful middle ground between them, and having the door opened, and entering.
Forgiveness and justice are both very great things. How are we to resolve the tension between the two? Its implications reach deeply into many of the situations of our own lives.
However great both forgiveness and justice are, to engage the basic question of forgiveness earnestly, both within oneself and in dialogue with others, is also a very great thing.
Allow me continue to take up its challenge a little more now. This is a key point. Nonetheless, the heavenly voice that starts by calling it a draw, as it were, goes on to rule in favor of Hillel, because his is a way of mercy. Okay then, so Kernberg and Kohut are BOTH right, and yet, at the end of the day, if we had to choose between the two…or if we left Heaven to decide between them….
Okay then, in the course of my day, if someone insults me, it is fair and right for me to be angry, and to let this person know it, in a civilized way. Both are good; the second ultimately is favored and worthy of reaching for.
Simon had a lot of mixed emotions and although his subconscious was telling him he should've forgave Karl , he stayed silent and said nothing. I agree with Josek "it's not your place to forgive in the name of all the Jews", but yet again what Bolek said made Simon and I be a little bit more in peace.
Essentially, Simon was able to write, The Sun Flower, and allowed ordinary people to share whether or not they would've forgiven the ss man. Add to Cart failed. Please try again later. Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed. Adding to library failed. Please try again. Follow podcast failed. Unfollow podcast failed. Stream or download thousands of included titles. The Sunflower By: Simon Wiesenthal. Narrated by: Robertson Dean,Laural Merlington. No default payment method selected. Add payment method. Switch payment method.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method. Pay using card ending in. Taxes where applicable. Publisher's Summary While imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was taken one day from his work detail to the bedside of a dying member of the SS.
Copyright renewed by Simon Wiesenthal. Preface and Symposium copyright , , by Schocken Books Incorporated. P Tantor. Critic Reviews "In simple yet elegant prose, Wiesenthal recreates the grim reality of a time when Eastern Europe was hell.
Never lapsing into the maudlin or self-pitying, his matter-of-fact realism makes the images all the more horrifying. Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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