In recent discussions of what the reader would do if placed in Simon’s position, a controversial issue has been whether they would forgive the dying SS man, Karl, or not. On the one hand, some argue that the incident didn’t happen directly to Simon. From this perspective, Simon then has no right to forgive for the people that it happened to. On the other hand, however, others argue that since he showed remorse that he could be forgiven but not forgotten to ease his mind. In the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, “No one can forgive crimes committed against other people. It is therefore preposterous to assume that anyone alive can extend forgiveness for the suffering of any one of the six million people who perished”(Wiesenthal 171). According …show more content…
Though I concede that the SS man showed remorse, I still maintain that Simon did the right thing by not forgiving him. For example, it would be like apologizing for a car crash because you drove the same type of car that caused the accident. Although some might object that he himself went through brutal events that he could answer for the other Jews, I would reply that it didn’t happen to him directly so he has no right. The issue is important because the Holocaust should never be …show more content…
Moshe Bejski himself writes, “But how can forgiveness be asked of someone whose death sentence will soon be carried out by the dying mans partner in crime, who are part of the same regime, when the dying person himself admits that he too has been committing these same crimes against the Jewish people and was only stopped when the hand of God overtook him”(Wiesenthal 114). Bejski’s point is that how can he ask for forgiveness from someone who has suffered so much atrocity from his people, and was only stopped because he’s dying. Would he have stopped being an SS man if he wasn’t dying? My discussion of forgiveness is in fact addressing the larger matter of would he have stopped if he wasn't dying or would his conscious have stopped him? The question of if he ever felt true remorse can never be answered. I believe Karl felt remorse, but I’m not sure to what extent. But the burning house was only part of his story. It was only one of the many crimes he committed against the Jews. In sum, then, someone who hasn’t felt true remorse doesn’t deserve to be forgiven. Asking a Jew that had nothing to do with his sin doesn’t fix things for Karl. In addition, Beljski goes on to argue that, “Forgiveness is being sought - that of a Jew whose fate had already been sealed by the dying man’s comrades, who did not then feel, and most likely never felt, remorse”(Wiesenthal 114). The essence of
Simon Wiesenthal’s book The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness spoke to me about the question of forgiveness and repentance. Simon Wiesenthal was a Holocaust prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. He experienced many brutal and uneasy experiences that no human being should experience in their lifetime and bear to live with it. Death, suffering, and despair were common to Simon Wiesenthal that he questioned his own religious faith because he asks why would his God allow the Holocaust happen to his people to be slaughter and not do anything to save them. During Simon Wiesenthal time as a Jewish Holocaust, Simon was invited to a military hospital where a dying Nazi SS officer wanted to have a conversation. The Nazi SS officer told Simon his story of his life and confesses to Simon of his horrific war crimes. Ultimately, the SS officer wanted forgiveness for what he done to Simon’s Jewish people. Simon Wiesenthal could not respond to his request, because he did not know what to do with a war criminal that participate in mass genocide to Simon’s people. Simon Wiesenthal lives throughout his life on asking the same crucial question, “What would I have done?” (Wiesenthal 98). If the readers would be on the exact situation as Simon was
He should not have forgiven him because, “One soldier got up from the bench and looked at us as if we were animals in a zoo” (Wiesenthal 20). “Rectifying a misdeed is a matter to be settled between the perpetrator and this victim” (Wiesenthal 54). This shows only a small portion of what the Jewish people were treated as during this time. They were treated like animals, yet they are completely human. Also, an approximate eleven million people were killed during the Holocaust. Six million were Polish citizens, three million were Polish Jews, and another three million were Polish Christians. A single person who was not affected by the soldiers decisions cannot represent the eleven million people who were affected. In order to achieve actual “forgiveness” he would need to speak to every single person who was
When Simon was asked to forgive the SS officer, he blankly looked at the man, stood up, and left. One of the main problems that he faced is he definitely was not able to absolve the man of the crimes considering he could not speak for his entire people. Wiesenthal did not have authority to absolve the actions of those who were responsible for the holocaust nor did he want to in the first place. Different people have different ideologies about the way that one can accept forgiveness. Literature from the Jewish culture has a lot to say about this and understandably so. For one, it is clear they thought little about verbal apologies from the Nazis for the atrocities they had committed in the
I thought angrily. How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith, their anger, their defiance? What does Your grandeur mean, Master of the Universe, in the face of all this cowardice, this decay, and this misery? Why do go on troubling these poor people’s wounded minds, their ailing bodies? … Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. … But look at these men whom You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? The pray before You! They praise Your name! … I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man.” (Wiesel
Forgiveness is not an action that should be taken for granted. Nor should it be easily accepted without a second thought. It was strong of Simon to refuse to give Karl an answer to his request. “Possibly, there are circumstances in which forgiving is a temptation, a promise of relief that might be morally dubious. Indeed, the refusal to forgive may represent the more demanding moral accomplishment” (Brudholm 2). Simon did not give into the temptation to give a dying man the easy answer he sought and say that he forgave him without thinking it over. Karl assumed that he would be forgiven, even though he did not express much remorse about what he had done. Because he did not automatically tell Karl that he forgave him, Simon never had ...
“Nazi Hunting: Simon Wiesenthal.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 10 June 2013. Web. 06 Feb. 2014
In Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower on the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness the author is asked to fulfill a dying solider last wish to forgive him because of the crimes he has committed against the Jewish people of the Holocaust. When Wiesenthal is asked for forgiveness, he simply leaves the room. Wiesenthal states that the encounter with the dying man left “a heavy burden” (Wiesenthal 55) on him. The confessions in which he admitted to have “profoundly disturbed [him]” (Wiesenthal 55). As Wiesenthal tries to make sense of what he has encountered he begins to make excuses for why the man might have done what he did. He say...
He told of being on a balcony, seeing people pass by, and wanting to have a machine gun to release his anger. His hatred for the Germans and what they had done to him and his family was very evident. On a personal level Thomas Buergenthal learned to forgive, because it benefited him more than staying bitter. He sums this up when talking about himself and his mother by saying, “ I doubt that we would have been able to preserve our sanity had we remained consumed by hatred for the rest of our lives.” The process of forgiving took a lot of time. He eventually realized “that one cannot hope to protect mankind from crimes such as those that were visited upon us unless one struggles to break the cycle of hatred and violence that invariably leads to more suffering by innocent human beings.” This realization lead Buergenthal to go to law school and work in multiple human rights organizations and courts. He felt fit to serve in such a place as he was a victim of the greatest infringement on human rights in
Murders inflicted upon the Jewish population during the Holocaust are often considered the largest mass murders of innocent people, that some have yet to accept as true. The mentality of the Jewish prisoners as well as the officers during the early 1940’s transformed from an ordinary way of thinking to an abnormal twisted headache. In the books Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and Ordinary men by Christopher R. Browning we will examine the alterations that the Jewish prisoners as well as the police officers behaviors and qualities changed.
The events which have become to be known as The Holocaust have caused much debate and dispute among historians. Central to this varied dispute is the intentions and motives of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial but bestselling book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in many ways saw the reigniting of the debate and a flurry of scholarly and public interest. Central to Goldhagen’s disputed argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely, willingly took part in the atrocities because of deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. This in many ways challenged earlier works like Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” which arguably gives a more complex explanation for the motives of the perpetrators placing the emphasis on circumstance and pressure to conform. These differing opinions on why the perpetrators did what they did during the Holocaust have led to them being presented in very different ways by each historian. To contrast this I have chosen to focus on the portrayal of one event both books focus on in detail; the mass shooting of around 1,500 Jews that took place in Jozefow, Poland on July 13th 1942 (Browning:2001:225). This example clearly highlights the way each historian presents the perpetrators in different ways through; the use of language, imagery, stylistic devices and quotations, as a way of backing up their own argument. To do this I will focus on how various aspects of the massacre are portrayed and the way in which this affects the presentation of the per...
I believe that Karl could have had better timing in terms of confessing his sins, but I guess it's better late than never. It sounds suspicious to why he was so eager to apologize to a Jewish man at the very last possible moment, which it makes it sound not so sincere. It makes one think if he would have confessed if nothing tragic happened to him, or if he would just continue to kill otherwise. If this lies the truth, Karl could have been trying to find a way to forgive his actions in order to make peace with himself and have a good afterlife. Under these circumstances, I do believe at some extent Simon shouldn't have forgiven him, but still stand with my original conscious where Karl should have been granted
Personally, I make mistakes every single day. For example, over this past winter break, my Mom bought our entire family tickets to the Seattle Boys Choir for the night I got home. Instead of going to the concert with my family I ditched them to go to a party at my high school friends house. My Mom was really hurt by my lack of recognition of her hard work to create a special memory for my family and I. All she wanted to do was spend time with me and I blew her off for something pointless. When I do something I regret, I hope that whoever afflicted would find it in their heart to see that I was sorry, and that they see that given the chance to re-do the situation, I would choose to change my actions. To be clear, I am not in the slightest defending or validating the actions of the Nazi regime during the time of the Holocaust. But as a person who has regretted certain actions or decisions I’ve made, I can understand the root of his need for forgiveness. The Nazi’s plea for forgiveness points toward his recognition of fault. Many Nazi’s were operating on the mindset that the atrocities they were committing were actually in the right. This Nazi, seeing the error in his actions, shows that he realizes what he did was wrong. For some people, the request for forgiveness isn’t enough to justify the act of giving it. In my opinion, if the person who is requesting the forgiveness is genuine in their motives, then they deserve
This consequence was a mark that will never be forgotten, or should not be. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust, spoke about this in his Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech. He said that he had tried to not let people forget, but that is a choice for them. In Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, Elie Wiesel states, “And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because, if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.” What Wiesel means by this is that if we forget what happened between 1941 and 1945, then we are no different than the Nazi’s that killed them. We are no different than the monsters. We are their accomplices, their aide. We helped them achieve the one thing they wanted to get done. We made them who they are. However, when dealing with conflict, he questions himself, he asks, “Do I have the right to represent the multitudes that have perished? Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf?” These questions have many deep meanings. One of which is that can Elie act in place of the other Jew’s that burned? Can he secure the award on the other’s behalf? That is how some people, like Wiesel, deal with situations that challenge the impregnability of nations, races, ethnicities,
That doubt plagued Wiesel, causing him to abandon his faith and walk away from it. However, that nameless “neighbor” he encountered not only walked away, but followed a different path, a path where the man intending to slaughter the Jewish people was the sole figure he believed in.
Most narratives out of the Holocaust from the Nazis point of view are stories of soldiers or citizens who were forced to partake in the mass killings of the Jewish citizens. Theses people claim to have had no choice and potentially feared for their own lives if they did not follow orders. Neighbors, The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, by Jan T. Gross, shows a different account of people through their free will and motivations to kill their fellow Jewish Neighbors. Through Gross’s research, he discovers a complex account of a mass murder of roughly 1,600 Jews living in the town of Jedwabne Poland in 1941. What is captivating about this particular event was these Jews were murdered by friends, coworkers, and neighbors who lived in the same town of Jedwabne. Gross attempts to explain what motivated these neighbors to murder their fellow citizens of Jedwabne and how it was possible for them to move on with their lives like it had never happened.