Simon Wiesenthal The Sunflower

Simon was an architect and many other things before he entered the ghetto. In the ghetto, he was simply just a Jew. Like so many other humans during world war two and the holocaust, Simon was reduced to one word, Jew. Simon paints a scary sadly realistic portrayal of the ghettos from a prisoner perspective with his words. Out of the many moving quotes Simon gives us throughout the sunflower, this one stuck with me the most, he writes “ I once read somewhere that it is impossible to break a man’s firm belief . If I ever thought that true, life in a concentration camp taught me differently. It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man...So one begins to doubt, one begins to cease to believe in a world order in which God has a definite place. One really begins to think that God is on leave” (Wiesenthal, 9). In my opinion, this must have been how most prisoners felt while enslaved in concentration camps. This also makes it difficult to understand why Wiesenthal did not just flat out say he does not forgive the soldier. When you go as far to believe God is not present in your life how does one not be resentful toward forgiveness of a nazi soldier?

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

The soldier had asked the nurse to bring Simon to him because he felt the need to share his crimes with a Jewish person. He tells Simon, “I must tell you something dreadful… something inhuman”(Wiesenthal, 11). He shows remorse by calling his crime dreadful and inhuman, and all he wants is to tell Simon his story and be forgiven. The soldier is heavily wounded, and his face is covered in bandages. He tells Simon about how his own parents didn’t trust him as a child because he joined the Hitler youth. Even if his parents didn’t agree with what he was doing, they should always be able to trust their own son. When the war began, he volunteered for the SS, and the last words he heard his father say were that no good would come of it. He is truly a man deserving of pity in his final days.

After reading The Sunflower, I’ll admit I had a lot of questions. When I started reading some of the response essays, I saw some of the same questions asked that I had. One that stuck out to me the most was the essay by Alan L. Berger. Berger’s reason for writing his essay was the issues being inflexible and his students questioning them. What was very evident to me about his essay was how he questioned why was Simon silent, If Karl was sincere, If Simon was the one to answer Karl’s response, and was Simon scarred by the interaction with Karl?

The Holocaust was a genocide that occurred from 1933-1945, and one of its survivors was Simon Wiesenthal. After he was set free from the concentration camp, he dedicated his life to finding Nazi war criminals and persecuting them in court. Later on in his life, he wrote a memoir, The Sunflower. It was about one of his many experiences at the Lemberg concentration camp where he got roped into listening to a dying SS soldier, Karl. Right before Wiesenthal left Karl’s room, Karl asked Wiesenthal, on behalf of all the Jews he persecuted, for forgiveness. Wiesenthal left Karl’s room without forgiving him, and then asked his readers, “What would I have done?” At the end of The Sunflower, people who Wiesenthal picked to respond to his question, had their answers published. The most interesting response was Jose Hobday’s. Hobday believed that Wiesenthal should have forgiven to Karl because it would have given Karl a sense of peace, making it easier for him to pass on. Hobday had the correct answer to Wiesenthal’s question because even though all of the Jews that Karl persecuted are dead and will not be able to forgive him in person, Karl just wanted someone to know that he was sorry for his actions.

You wake up from your crowded bunk. You drink some watered down coffee. As you work, you smell the scent of burning flesh. You work hard but your stomach aches from hunger. You work some more, get very little lunch, then go back to work. You then eat dinner, get tallied that you survived another day, then go back to work. Finally, after a long day of work you go to bed to repeat this whole day tomorrow. A-7713 permanently printed on his arm as his name. Eliezer, more commonly named Elie Wiesel is a proud survivor of the Holocaust. He was taken from a ghetto as a child to go to a concentration camp named Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel was greatly influenced as a person from the concentration camp.

Millions of Jews died and the even the ones who did not die were left with a great deal of trauma and their lives will never be the same. Elie Wiesel was on the survivors and wrote the book “Night” that tells his story of the holocaust. Elie used a plethora of symbolism within the book that represented the sacrifice and desperation he lived through. Three symbols in the text that represent these things very well are the lessons on marching, the spoon inheritance, and Elie’s

In the Age of War and Displacement is characterized by imperialism, nationalism, racism, and power. In an era of both freedom and confinement, Simon Wiesenthal describes his experience of the Holocaust, which is used to analyze, what it means to be human. After World War One (WWI), the Germans lost, “Hitler assumed authority and began to blame the Jews for what happened in WWI” (Bingle). Within a few months, Germans started to believe Hitler that they were the master race or supermen, and had no trouble committing genocide of any group Hitler labeled as “bad” or “subhuman”. The Sunflower, address the nature and task of human but also gives a Jewish perspective of “Humanness”. Wiesenthal asks, “Were we truly all made of the same stud? If so, why were some murderers and other victims? Was there in fact any personal relationship between us, between the murderers and their victims, between our camp commandant, Wilhaus, and a tortured Jews (Wiesenthal 7)?

Simon Wiesenthal is known for being a survivor of the Nazi death camps and for dedicating his life to documenting the crimes of the Holocaust. He worked diligently to track down all the war criminals connected to the Holocaust. He founded the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna where he worked to document the Holocaust and prosecuted nearly 1,100 Nazi war criminals. He is also known for his involvement with the case of Karl Silberbauer, the man who arrested Ann Frank. Wiesenthal did truly impressive work in his life to make sure the lives of the millions of Jews killed did not go over looked and not forgotten. In the process, Simon wrote his very own book detailing all his encounters with the criminals of the war and his life inside the

Simon Wiesenthal, arguably the world 's most well-known Nazi-hunter, stood as a symbol to the Nazis scattered around the world. Simon Wiesenthal 's search for escaped Nazi war criminals consumed his life post-war as he was one of the sole seekers of justice for the victims of the Holocaust. In the years of Wiesenthal 's life, he faced many hardships, not only in the Nazi 's labor camps and death camps, but after the war as he pressured the world to convict those responsible for the Holocaust. Simon Wiesenthal relentlessly sought out escaped Nazis because he felt that there wasn 't enough being done to bring justice to the Nazi war criminals, and in general, the world should have done more to capture the escaped Nazis instead of letting those responsible for the Holocaust get away.

Edward H. Flannery states that The Sunflower presents “an important moral question” (Flannery 135). Flannery argues in favor of forgiveness. He states that Karl, the dying SS man, could had asked for forgiveness for what “he had done” (Flannery 137) not forgiveness on the behalf of others. Flannery states that

Simon Wiesenthal ( December 1908 – September 2005) was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer.He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II.

“Would you forgive the people that shot at you and your partner while you were on duty?”

Oskar Schindler faced many conflicts in his life. The main conflict he faced was overcoming the Nazis and saving over one thousand Jewish People. Schindler, with out a job at the time, joined the Nazi Party and followed on the heels of the SS when the Germans invaded Poland. This is when Schindler took over two previously Jewish owned companies that dealt with the manufacture and sales of enamel kitchenware products and opened up his own enamel shop right outside of Krakow near the Jewish ghetto. There, he employed mostly Jewish workers, which saved them from being deported to labor camps. Though twice the Gestapo arrested him, he got released because of his many connections and with many bribes. Most

Out of the twenty experts that were presented their opinions on The Sunflower differ from each other. Out of all the experts, there is only two female. Jose Hobday and Mary Gordon both have different opinions and expertise. Hobday is a nun and she said she would forgive the dying soldier. On the other side for Gordon, she is an author and she said she would not forgive the soldier. There is four male white who were in the symposium part of the story. Harold Samuel Kusher, Matthie Ricard, Tzvetan Todorov, and Herbert Marcuse put their thoughts on forgiving the soldier or not. Kusher is a motivational speaker and he didn’t really state if he would forgive but he does agree with Simon that silence was acceptable in the situation. Ricard is a monk