It is hard for many people to take a second and walk in another's shoes and truly understand problems greater than their own, whether it be through poverty, chronic illness, or a simple cold, it is different for every person and hard to mimic. With the Holocaust in question, I would like to say that I am not the only person who finds it almost hard to believe. Did we truly do this to our own kind, and even so, less than a hundred years ago? It is very hard to imagine what the prisoners of the Holocaust went through every day on the street, in ghettos, and in the camps. In part one of The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal, he is brought to a dying S.S man and is asked for his absolution. At the time, Wiesenthal did not know how to respond, so he …show more content…
Wiesenthal believed that he himself could not forgive this man, only the ones he killed could forgive him. Though, guilt still clouded his mind as he wondered if he had done the right thing. If I were in Wiesenthal’s place, I would have done the same, but instead of letting the S.S die with a fogged mine of remorse, I would have told him that I could not forgive him personally, but I accepted his plea of an apology. My own personal opinion may or may not be right, but then again, I am not Wiesenthal, I was not there when the S.S man gave his speech of terrible things he had done to Jews. I could never be there in Wiesenthal’s place. Though, I would like to believe in this scenario that I am Wiesenthal, I would tell the S.S man that he could not directly be forgiven from me. Yes, he did kill innocent people in brutal ways, such as crowding families into a ghetto house and setting it to flames, but this man spoke in such a way that made me …show more content…
Ricard believes that “forgiveness is always possible and one should always forgive”. In his own response to Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower, he explains that there are different situations in one’s life that people can find it to be difficult to forgive. He also says that forgiveness does not mean absolution, which is a great point. If Wiesenthal did forgive the S.S man, that would not mean he would give him his absolution. The S.S man would have to earn his absolution through death, if his belief was in God. Perhaps Wiesenthal wouldn’t have felt so much regret in his lack of an answer if he had said that the S.S man was forgiven. Wiesenthal may have felt better about his stance of being a Jew being the first to forgive a Nazi. Ricard also said, “For the dying SS soldier, feeling remorse in recognition of the monsterousess of his deeps was a first good step. But he could have created much more good by telling his fellow Nazi soldiers to abandon their inhuman behavior”. Knowing now what others could have possibly done to the S.S man for saying something along the lines of that, he would have surely been tortured or killed by the more radical Nazi’s who truly believed Jews were the scum of the Earth. To summarize, Ricard deemed that Wiesenthal should have gave forgiveness to the S.S man, but to not forgive him for the people he had
He experiences numerous people being hanged, beaten, and tortured daily which changes the amount of faith and trust that he has in Humanity and God. He sees faithful and courageous people crumble in front of his own eyes before their lives are stolen. Towards the end of the book, Wiesel is in the hospital at the camp for surgery on his leg and the man in the bed next to him says something that is bitterly true, “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people,” (Wiesel 81). Wiesel doesn’t argue with this, which shows that he had lost his faith in humanity, and doesn’t know who to trust. Wiesel is also naive and vulnerable at the beginning of the book. He refuses to touch the food at the ghetto and strongly considers rebelling against the officers at the Concentration camps. At the same time, he is also a strong and fairly well-fed boy who does not grow tired easily. He is shocked that the world is letting these barbarities occur in modern times. Over time, he grows accustomed to the beatings and animal-like treatment that is routine at the camps. “I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked….. Had I changed that much so fast?”
In the symposium section, Abraham Joshua Heschel quoted, “No one can forgive crimes committed against other people. It is therefore preposterous to assume that anybody alive can extend forgiveness for the suffering of any one of the six million people who perished.” (171). Simon Wiesenthal would possibly never forgive the SS officer because he doesn’t represents to those who suffer and died by the SS officers because he is just one jewish person out of many different jews that died. At that point, Simon Wiesenthal does not represent the rest of the jews and other Holocaust
The author of my essay is Simon Balic and he is a historian and culturologist. The title of the work is, Sunflower Symposium (109-111). Balic wrote this essay thirty years after The Sunflower was written. Balic argues that he does not forgive the sufferer, although he does feel some remorse. The author supports and develops the thesis in a chronological order in order to take the reader through exactly what was seen, heard, and thought of during this time. Both Weisenthal and Balic had a liable reason to not forgive the soldier, “There are crimes whose enormity cannot be measured. Rectifying a misdeed is a matter to be settled between the perpetrator and the victim” (Wiesenthal 54). Through this, Balic was trying to speak to his audience of fellow historians.
Analysis and explanation of Wiesenthal’s actions 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.
In Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower, he recounts his incidence of meeting a dying Nazi soldier who tells Simon that he was responsible for the death of his family. Upon telling Simon the details, Karl asks for his forgiveness for what he helped accomplish. Simon leaves Karl without giving him an answer. This paper will argue that, even though Karl admits to killing Simon’s family in the house, Simon is morally forbidden to forgive Karl because Karl does not seem to show genuine remorse for his committed crime and it is not up to Simon to be able to forgive Karl for his sins. This stand will be supported by the meaning of forgiveness, evidence from the memoir, quotes from the published responses to Simon’s moral question, and arguments from Thomas Brudholm, Charles Griswold, and Trudy Govier. The possibly raised objection, for this particular modified situation, of forgiveness being necessary to move on from Desmond Tutu will be countered with the logic of needing to eventually find an end somewhere.
There are many heroic individuals in history that have shown greatness during a time of suffering ,as well as remorse when greatness is needed, but one individual stood out to me above them all. He served as a hero among all he knew and all who knew him. This individual, Simon Wiesenthal, deserves praise for his dedication to his heroic work tracking and prosecuting Nazi war criminals that caused thousands of Jews, Gypsies, Poles and other victims of the Holocaust to suffer and perish.
In The Sunflower while in a hospital, Simon Wiesenthal was approached by a nurse who leads him to a dying SS soldier named Karl who confessed to Wiesenthal of his heinous acts against Jews, He asked Wiesenthal for his forgiveness. Instead of replying Wiesenthal walked away and later that night the soldier passed away. Through Karl’s confession you could see that he was remorseful for the actions committed through his time as an SS soldier; therefore, Karl should be forgiven.
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...
Botwinick writes in A History of the Holocaust, “The principle that resistance to evil was a moral duty did not exist for the vast majority of Germans. Not until the end of the war did men like Martin Niemoeller and Elie Wiesel arouse the world’s conscience to the realization that the bystander cannot escape guilt or shame” (pg. 45). In The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick writes of a world where Niemoeller and Wiesel’s voices never would have surfaced and in which Germany not only never would have repented for the Holocaust, but would have prided itself upon it. Dick writes of a world where this detached and guiltless attitude prevails globally, a world where America clung on to its isolationist policies, where the Axis powers obtained world domination and effectively wiped Jews from the surface, forcing all resistance and culture to the underground and allowing for those in the 1960’s Nazi world to live without questioning the hate they were born into.
As early as age thirteen, we start learning about the Holocaust in classrooms and in textbooks. We learn that in the 1940s, the German Nazi party (led by Adolph Hitler) intentionally performed a mass genocide in order to try to breed a perfect population of human beings. Jews were the first peoples to be put into ghettos and eventually sent by train to concentration camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. At these places, each person was separated from their families and given a number. In essence, these people were no longer people at all; they were machines. An estimation of six million deaths resulting from the Holocaust has been recorded and is mourned by descendants of these people every day. There are, however, some individuals who claim that this horrific event never took place.
I think he felt that if he got your forgiveness then he could die in peace for all the bad he had done. A lot of Jewish people had died due to what Hitler ordered everyone in Germany army to do. Albert Speer was a high-ranking Nazi member and he was also Hitler’s minister and even though he knew he was going to jail no matter what was said at the Nuremberg trials he had confessed to all the things he had done. According to Speer “My moral guilt is not subject to the statute of limitations, it cannot be erased in my lifetime” (245). In making this comment, Speer knew that even though he was punished with twenty years of imprisonment that they only punished his legal guilt. Speer was haunted by the things he had done and he knew that he did not deserve anyone’s forgiveness. Even Speer, Hitler’s minister, knew that no one in the German army deserved anyone’s sympathy or
The position to choose between forgiving one’s evil oppressor and letting him die in unrest is unlike any other. The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal explores the possibilities and limitations of forgiveness through the story of one Jew in Nazi Germany. In the book, Wiesenthal details his life in the concentration camp, and the particular circumstance in which a dying Nazi asks him for forgiveness for all the heinous acts committed against Jews while under the Nazi regime. Wiesenthal responds to this request by leaving the room without giving forgiveness. The story closes with Wiesenthal posing the question, “What would you have done?” Had I been put in the position that Wiesenthal was in, I would ultimately choose to forgive the Nazi on the basis
Wiesel’s speech, persuasive in nature, was designed to educate his audience as to the violence and killing of innocent people across the globe. Wiesel spoke of acts that had taken place throughout his lifetime, from his youth, up through present day atrocities. His focu...
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.
He says, “These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations,... so much violence; so much indifference.” (4). Indifference is shown by not only the people involved in these violent events, but also Wiesel’s audience as well, many clueless of these events. For one to fail to know and understand these events in order to stop and bring awareness to them is just as wrong as committing the event in the first place, according to Wiesel. One must also believe the event itself to escape the corruptive qualities of indifference. During the Holocaust, many did not believe what was happening and chose to then ignore it rather than do anything about it. The unaware audience and people in the 1940s thoroughly proves the corrosiveness of