Surely the critical matter posed by that concluding question has to do with the word “I”—what each of us brings to it: a particular life's experiences, with their shaping influence on what is believed and upheld, what is doubted or denied. When Wiesenthal asks “Was my silence at the bedside of the dying Nazi right or wrong?” he is, presumably, putting the question to himself, not us—challenging his moral life as he asks us to do so with that further last question mentioned above. He obviously believes his silence to have been “right”—the only decent and honorable reply his particular life allowed him to make. For us today it becomes quite another matter, the contemplation of that question: we bring to it not the life described in the story, but lives lived at a far remove from what is described, evoked with such telling, unnerving detail and power, and alas, authority—that of the one who was, unforgettably, there. Still, we can attempt to make our individual effort—a gesture of human solidarity with those who, like the author, survived to render an account of that worst time in the history of humankind.
With great unease and with no conviction that I would have had a ghost of a chance at surviving (either morally or physically) the sustained, moment-to-moment terror and ignominy chronicled in The Sunflower, I gird myself, and leap with this quite mixed, even contradictory speculation: were I to have survived, as the author did, to experience the “moment” offered in this moral drama (the call for forgiveness by the Nazi at death's door), I would have turned away in a tearful rage—even as I (that is, the person I was brought up to be) would pray for the Lord's forgiveness of that apparently repentant Nazi; pray for him as I was taught to pray for the forgiveness of any of us who somehow, some way come to realize the evil of our ways.
Not that I (foolishly, outrageously) would compare any of us ordinary “sinners” to the Nazi monsters, the leaders or their minions. The point, rather, is the limitations of our lives—we can only bring ourselves, in all our finiteness, to this table, this symposium that is, really, the merest footnote to an enormously tragic and melancholy twentieth-century saga: our talk (as in Shakespeare's “words, words, words”) about how others might have behaved under circumstances all too dreadfully familiar to them, and one has to say it, all too inconceivable to us. Still, with caveats galore, I proceed to tell of my mother's wish for my brother and me, that we learn how to understand, and too, that we learn how to forgive: understand the mistakes and errors of our ways, in the hope that we can do (can be) better; and forgive ourselves, lest we give our errant or evil side the continuing hold over us that such a refusal of forgiveness all too commonly, readily ensures. To sustain that moral conviction is not easy even in this comfortable, this privileged life that fate has given me—how often many of us who profess the Christian ethic of forgiveness succumb to smugness, arrogance, pretentiousness, a cocky self-importance that is utterly incompatible with the kind of absolution and reconciliation implied in the act of forgiveness: no exculpation for wrong, but an acknowledgment that a long, tenaciously critical look inward justifies a wholehearted response of merciful grace, for which one prays.
I would, then, pray to God for the forgiveness of that Nazi, who claimed to be repentant—I, the present-day son of my parents, the one who inhabits this life. I say the above, though, with no conviction of righteousness, never mind (Lord, spare us) a temptation to self-righteousness. Who am I (the rhetorical question must be asked!) to tell even myself, let alone this author who has generously taken public moral pause on behalf of all of us, what ought have been done under circumstances, let's face it, wherein the conscience in so many of us (the same conscience, with all its assumptions, that distinguishes us as the somewhat “civilized” people we at least sometimes are, or try to be) is no doubt maimed before the heart stops beating.
Let us, who are lucky to have been given by fate the safety to read and ponder The Sunflower, to pose its haunting, provocative, thoroughly challenging moral questions to ourselves, not only struggle for (and with) our various responses, answers, but take to heart what may be, finally, the author's real intent for us: that we never, ever forget what happened to him and millions of others; that their experiences become (through the movement of mind and heart that goes with reading, with writing) for now and for the future our very own—an introspective moral legacy we dare not relinquish for our own sakes, never mind out of respect for those whose suffering has enabled that legacy.
THE DALAI LAMA
I believe one should forgive the person or persons who have committed atrocities against oneself and mankind. But this does not necessarily mean one should forget about the atrocities committed. In fact, one should be aware and remember these experiences so that efforts can be made to check the reoccurrence of such atrocities in the future.
I find such an attitude especially helpful in dealing with the Chinese government's stand on the Tibetan people's struggle to regain freedom. Since China's invasion of Tibet in 1949–50, more than 1.2 million Tibetans, one-fifth of the country's population, have lost their lives due to massacre, execution, starvation, and suicide. Yet for more than four decades we have struggled to keep our cause alive and preserve our Buddhist culture of nonviolence and compassion.
It would be easy to become angry at these tragic events and atrocities. Labeling the Chinese as our enemies, we could self-righteously condemn them for their brutality and dismiss them as unworthy of further thought or consideration. But that is not the Buddhist way.
Here I would like to relate a very interesting incident. A few years back, a Tibetan monk who had served about eighteen years in a Chinese prison in Tibet came to see me after his escape to India. I knew him from my days in Tibet and remember last seeing him in 1959. During the course of that meeting I had asked him what he felt was the biggest threat or danger while he was in prison. I was amazed by his answer. It was extraordinary and inspiring. I was expecting him to say something else; instead he said that what he most feared was losing his compassion for the Chinese.
EUGENE J. FISHER
Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower embodies one of the most compelling moral questions to have emerged from the Second World War. Its reissuance challenges a new generation of Jews and Christians to grapple with it. That is an event to be welcomed, painful as the grappling is likely to be for many of us.
When The Sunflower first appeared in English, I had not yet begun in my present position in Catholic-Jewish relations for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. I can remember being relieved that no one, then, asked me to respond to it. I would have had no way to start. In one sense, I still don't. As several of the original responders stated, no one can really know what she or he would have done in such a situation. One can only come up with what one would hope to have done. Nor can any Christian really speculate, as other commentators acknowledged, as to what a Jew should have done in the situation described. Christians simply do not have the experiential base to make a moral judgment on Jewish behavior with regard to the Shoah.
Those writing today do have some advantages over the original responders. One, of course, is to be able to draw on their reflections, which plumbed the depths of the issue from numerous angles. The statements supporting the narrator's silence and refusal to pretend to forgive are argued, to my mind, convincingly. Most of these are by Jewish respondents. In both Jews and Christians, however, I can discern an uneasiness with any “either/or” resolution, since repentance and reconciliation are liturgically central to both traditions as seen in the holy days of Yom Kippur and Good Friday. The difference in reaction, then, may not stem from theology as much as from existential stance.
The original collection was so trenchant and complete, it would seem that there would be little substantive to add. There is, however, much that has come out between Jews and Christians through the events of the past two decades of intense Jewish-Christian dialogue and equally intense controversy. We may well find in this second collection, then, a difference in tone and perhaps substance from the earlier responses. If
so, this might be a valuable barometer of how the relationship has changed over the years.
Since the first edition of this book we have seen President Reagan's visit to Bitburg and the election of Kurt Waldheim, as well as controversies over Edith Stein, Cardinal Glemp, and the Auschwitz Convent. One of several leitmotifs running through them, often in the form of a charge by the Christian side, has been the question: Why can't they (the Jews) forgive? We Christians do. Why can't they let it alone and get on with living? In other words, the question so presciently raised and profoundly framed by Simon Wiesenthal has emerged as critical to Jewish-Christian relations.
With regard to Bitburg and Waldheim, I participated in what came to be called “the Forgiveness Debate” with two British Christian colleagues, who felt that it would be healthy for the Jewish community, if not to forget, at least to begin to forgive. I argued that it is, on the one hand, too soon for this, since the essential sign of repentance is a “turning away” (teshuvah) from evil and toward the good. While well begun by Christians, I believe that if I were Jewish, I would wait a generation or so to see if the official documents and statements of the Churches do, in fact, bring about the transformation toward which they confessedly aim.
Secondly, I believe it is the height of arrogance for Christians to ask Jews to forgive them. On what grounds? We can, as established by evidence of changed teachings and changed behavior, repent and work toward mutual reconciliation with Jews. But we have no right to put Jewish survivors in the impossible moral position of offering forgiveness, implicitly, in the name of the six million (as, again, several of the original respondents articulated quite well). Placing a Jew in this anguished position further victimizes him or her. This, in my reading, was the final sin of the dying Nazi.
Bitburg was a classic case in point. There, the Christian leader of the victorious Allies met with the Christian leader of the defeated Germans at a Nazi cemetery to “forgive” each other for what Christians had done and allowed to be done to Jews by Nazis. Jews who raised questions were dismissed by some other Christians as “unforgiving” and even “vengeful.” It was a sad replay of the ancient stereotypes that had contributed to the problem in the first place.
Over the years, I have kept getting from my fellow Christians variations of the same refrain. And I keep rejecting them. I also receive the question from well-meaning Catholics and Jews: Has the Church officially apologized to the Jews yet and asked for their forgiveness? “The Church has done more,” I reply, hoping that a theological response will satisfy a sociological and psychological question. It has expressed its repentance before God and before all humankind. It has refrained from asking “the Jews” (which Jews speak for all?) for “forgiveness.” That could easily be seen as “cheap grace.”
In 1990, at a meeting of the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee (ILC) in Prague, which I had the honor to attend, Cardinal Edward I. Cassidy of the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews spoke officially for the universal Church of its proper attitude after the Holocaust being one of “repentance (teshuvah).” The Hebrew biblical term was used so that no one could mistake the intent. In December of 1990, at an ILC event in Rome commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council's formal declaration on the Church's relations to the Jews, Pope John Paul II pointedly made the statement of Cardinal Cassidy his own. In the spring of 1992, the statement of repentance was made by a representative of the Spanish hierarchy before a large group of visiting American rabbis at an event in Madrid commemorating the expulsion of the Jews from Spain five hundred years earlier. In late May of 1992, it was repeated as the official position of the Catholic Church by Cardinal Cassidy at the ILC meeting in Baltimore.
These Church statements reflect sentiments expressed since the Second Vatican Council by Catholic bishops’ conferences and their Protestant counterparts in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Australia. So there is little doubt as to what official Catholic teaching is on this matter today. They represent a different sort of answer from the dilemma which The Sunflower so trenchantly sets up. In the person of its official representatives, the Christian community asks, through sincere repentance (the test of which is change of behavior) for forgiveness not directly of the Jews (for that would put surviving Jews in a morally intolerable situation) but of God. But one does this publicly, as the Pope has done it, since the offense is not only against the Jews but God and humanity as well.
And then the Churches must follow through with revised textbooks, improved New Testament translations, better sermons from the pulpit, and better lessons in the classroom. For the pulpit and classroom are the Church's key “delivery systems” when it comes to making a difference for the future in the long haul. Perhaps the Jewish community could offer a prayer or two that the efforts in this direction that have been begun by responsible Church leaders since World War II, and especially since the Second Vatican Council, will succeed in changing the face that Christianity presents to Judaism both radically and permanently.
EDWARD H. FLANNERY
The story in The Sunflower presents us with an important moral question: Is it permitted to refuse forgiveness to a sincerely repentant malefactor? The question is embedded in a real-life situation in which Simon, our author, an erstwhile internee in a World War II concentration camp, refuses a forgiveness requested by Karl, an SS man who had been actively involved in a heinous military action, but who now is close to death and repentant.
Simon refused simply by walking away from Karl. But apparently not so simply from himself. Somewhat later, Arthur, a fellow internee, makes this plain in this scolding of Simon:
And you…do stop talking about it. All this moaning and groaning leads to nothing. If we survive this camp—and I don't think we will—and if the world comes to its senses again, inhabited by people who look on each other as human beings, then there will be plenty of time to discuss the question of forgiveness. There will be votes for and against, there will be people who will never forgive you for not forgiving him…But anyhow nobody who has not had our experience will be able to understand fully.…
Arthur was right, I could see that. That night I slept soundly (p. 75).
Simon's sleep was not to remain so tranquil. Before the story draws to a close we find him still wrestling with the problem.
His subsequent behavior gives eloquent testimony to the ambivalence that possesses him. His decision to visit Karl's mother gives evidence of his uncertainty and guilt feelings. And the actual meeting gives a further clue of this. He refused to reveal to her the atrocities Karl had indulged in, tempted as he was to do so. It is difficult not to see these waverings as a leaning toward atonement.
What, in final analysis, are we to conclude regarding Simon's refusal to grant Karl the forgiveness he sought?
I can well understand Simon's refusal, but I find it impossible to defend it. I do not arrive at such a position easily. For anyone who holds an allegiance to our Judeo-Christian heritage and who has any sense of the horrors of the Shoah and of the savagery of its Nazi perpetrators cannot come easily to a decision on Simon's painful dilemma.
To comprehend it adequately one must take into consideration two basic components: the psychological or emotive aspects of the situation and its ethical or religious involvement. The psychological or emotive factors are of importance and should have an influence on the decision to be made, but when they are in serious conflict with ethical or religious principles they must give way, as, in my view, they must in the case before us. The eternal and millennial transcend the transient and terrestrial.
It is a cardinal principle of Judeo-Christian ethics that forgiveness must always be granted to the sincerely repentant. The only seeming exception to this in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures is in the New Testament allusion to the “unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit” (Mark 3:29). But this refers to a person's rejection of God and therefore precludes any relation to forgiveness
of humans. Contrariwise, in the same Gospel we read Jesus’ answer to the question of how many times one must forgive. Should it be “seven times”? Speaking out of his Jewish tradition, his answer was, “Seventy times seven times”—a metaphorical way of saying “always.”
Simon connives with the foregoing principle, though obliquely. When speaking of those bystanders who passively watched Nazi atrocities, he writes, “Was it not just as wicked for people to look on quietly and without protest at human beings enduring such shocking humiliation?” Does not watching the dying Nazi pleading for mercy in his final agony fit within his description of inhumanity?
The Sunflower story brings up the question of whether Simon had a right to forgive Karl in the name of all Jews. The question appears to me as irrelevant. The dying SS man did not ask him to speak in the name of all Jews or, for that matter, for the harm done to all Jews but only for what he had done. The situation was interpersonal; the right to speak for all Jews is public and juridical, which does not apply here. One could ask further: If Karl were to extend the scope of forgiveness to collective proportions and should die in this happy illusion, where would be the harm?
The ultimate question posed in The Sunflower asks whether the fundamental norms of ethics and morality are exceptionable in certain difficult circumstances. Two answers are generally given. The first, the traditional and religious one, holds to the universality and permanence of basic moral laws and thus finds them unexceptionable. The second denies this and in this way relativizes moral norms in order to render them subject to change and dependent on individual and social needs and desires. Both positions derive from differing religious, ethical, and ideological premises, which explains why in our secularized societies unanimity on such issues is rarely, if ever, attained.