Thus, in 1982, when the world's best-known Protestant, the Reverend Billy Graham, went to the Soviet Union, instead of taking the side of his tortured coreligionists, he repeatedly took the side of the Soviet authorities, telling churches that “God gives you the power to be a better worker, a more loyal citizen because in Romans 13 we are told to obey the authorities.” Had a rabbi made a similar pronouncement in a speech in a Soviet synagogue—something altogether unimaginable—he would have been read out of Jewish life.
None of this is meant to denigrate Christians; indeed I hold Christians responsible for the greatest social experiment in history, the founding of the United States. Nor is it an ode to Jews; their preoccupation with fighting evil has too often led to embracing terrible ideologies such as Marxism and its myriad nihilistic offshoots. It is only meant to explain why to Jews it is so patently obvious that it is morally wrong to forgive a man who has burned families alive, and to Christians it is equally obvious that one ought to.
DITH PRAN
Simon Wiesenthal's dilemma gets to the core of the issue of forgiveness. Can we as humans forgive people who have caused us such grief?
As a witness to and survivor of the Cambodian killing fields, I could never forgive or forget what the top leadership of the Khmer Rouge has done to me, my family, or friends. It's impossible. I blame the dozen leaders, the brains behind a sadistic plot, who ordered the deaths of millions of people, including the disabled, children, religious people, the educated, and anyone who they thought was a threat to their ideas. My father died of starvation, my three brothers and sister were killed, along with many nieces, nephews, and cousins. Friends I had known all my life and who worked beside me in the fields were taken away and killed. We lived in constant fear in the labor camps. There was no sympathy for us. We were in a cage with tigers and there was no way out. All we could do was pray to God.
When I talk about not forgiving the dozen leaders of the Khmer Rouge, I include Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, Leng Sary, and their entourage. They are the ones who had the plan of ridding the Khmer population of unwanted elements like people who were unable to work, people with ideas, or anyone who would get in the way of transforming Cambodia into an agrarian society. Not only did they kill a massive number of people, but they destroyed all institutions including the family, religion, and education. We had to pledge allegiance only to Angka, the Khmer Rouge politburo.
Pulling away from the Khmer Rouge leadership, I can forgive the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge, those who actually did the killing, although I can never forget what they did. Placed in Simon Wiesenthal's position, I would have forgiven the soldier. Why? I have always felt that the soldiers were trapped. Most of them came from the jungle, were uneducated and very poor. They were taught to kill. They were brainwashed. More importantly, they were forced to kill. If they didn't follow the orders of the Khmer Rouge leadership, not only would they have been killed, but their entire families would have been killed. They feared death.
I'm not saying what the soldiers did was right and I'm not offering them excuses, but at least I understand why they did what they did. I think the key to forgiveness is understanding. I just will never understand why the Khmer Rouge top leaders did what they did. What was the purpose? Where was their humanity? They had the option to stop the killing, to give people more than a spoonful of rice to eat, to end the fourteen to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week forced labor. It took an invasion by the Vietnamese army to stop their atrocities.
I could never forgive or forget what the Khmer Rouge leadership has done to my family. Would my siblings have been ruthlessly killed if it weren't for them? No. Cambodia had many years of peace before the civil war and eventual Khmer Rouge victory. Would my father have died from starvation if it weren't for the Khmer Rouge leaders? No. There was plenty of food in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge leadership decided to withhold it from the people.
We need to learn to separate the true culprits from the pawns, the evil masterminds from the brainwashed. We cannot label everyone the same. There is a world of difference between the leadership of the Khmer Rouge and the individuals who followed their orders. Yes, none of them are moral beings, but there is a chasm between someone who intentionally plots to destroy the very souls of people and someone who is not only stupid and brainwashed, but fears death enough (which is very human) to be forced to do wrong.
I cannot morally judge Simon Wiesenthal for silently walking out of the room after the soldier asked for forgiveness. But I feel this action has nagged at him because he has asked others what they would have done in his place. I feel that forgiveness is a very personal thing. I know some people won't understand my thoughts on this. But ultimately we all have to answer to God for our actions and we have to live with ourselves.
TERENCE PRITTIE
Men who are dying expect special consideration. Often enough, they are badly frightened and deeply unhappy. To ask absolution for one's sins when near death is a perfectly normal human reflex. What is completely unusual about Simon Wiesenthal's book The Sunflower is that a dying SS man should have sought absolution from people whom he had helped to persecute. This, obviously, poses a problem of immense complexity.
First, there is the problem of the SS man's conscience. If he wished merely to “confess,” he could have done so to a priest of his own religion. He could have asked God's forgiveness and he would, presumably, have received the standard answer that God's compassion is infinite, whenever repentance is real. Anyone who has fought on the battlefield knows that repentance, in the face of danger, seems real enough. Men under fire who have never prayed before, pray and promise “to be good” in the future—if God will oblige by rescuing them from impending death. The certainty rather than the mere possibility of death can only reinforce the plea for mercy. This is what Wiesenthal's SS man was after.
For the Jew to whom he made his plea the problem was totally different. The Jew was facing death every day that he remained alive. He knew that the very most that he could achieve for himself would be to face death bravely and to maintain his faith in his own identity up to the end. Had I been such a Jew I would have been affronted by the SS man's plea. I would have regarded it as an attempt to seek a cheap and easy “way out,” and the gift of a few belongings as a histrionic, mock-sentimental gesture.
A persecuted Jew could only forgive wrongs done to him personally; he could not possibly forgive genocide. I find the idea of a mock-forgiveness of a man who had helped to burn women and children alive repellent, and I cannot see how it could be other than mock-forgiveness, granted simply because a man happened to be dying. To forgive this one SS man would mean, by implication, to forgive every other SS man who murdered, on his deathbed.
The SS man should have been asking forgiveness of God, and not of man. He had sinned against the principles of humanity far more than he had sinned against a handful of doomed human beings. This was a matter between him and his Creator, not between him and a single, stray Jew picked out of a random working-party and forced to listen to his “confession.”
Should the Jew have told him this? It would be too much to expect of a badgered, brutalized concentration camp inmate to play the role of a philosopher. Nor could he possibly act as father confessor. He showed, in any case, remarkable restraint in listening to the SS man's terrible story without expressing his horror and hatred of such bestial cruelty. By walking out of the room without a word, he did the most sensible, the most logical, basically the most decent thing possible.
MATTHIEU RICARD
For a Buddhist, forgiveness is always possible and one should always forgive.
According to the Buddhist teachings, an action is not considered negative or sinful in and of itself, but because it produces suffering. Likewise, a virtuous act is what brings about more happiness in the world.
There are all kinds of situations in life, far less tragic than murder and genocide, that we find difficult to forgive. This is because we believe that there is such a thing
as a self that defines who we are for our whole lives; when this self is offended, we try to protect it. But our bodies and minds are not stable; they are changing every second. The notion of a stable and autonomous self is, from the Buddhist point of view, itself the source of inner poisons such as hatred, obsession, pride, and jealousy, for it divides us from others and prevents us from being more compassionate.
True compassion must embrace all things and everyone: the worthy and the guilty, the friend and the foe. No matter how bad someone is, we believe that the basic goodness remains. A piece of gold, after all, is still gold, even if buried in the ground. Once the dirt is removed, the true nature of the gold will be revealed.
“The only good thing about evil,” goes the Buddhist saying, “is that it can be purified.” In Buddhism, forgiveness does not mean absolution, but an opportunity for the inner transformation of both victim and perpetrator. The perpetrator of evil will himself suffer over many lifetimes to a degree determined by his actions, until he is ready for inner transformation.
For the victim, forgiveness is a way of transforming his own grief, resentment, or hatred into good. To grant forgiveness to someone who has truly changed is not a way of condoning or forgetting his or her past crimes, but of acknowledging whom he or she has become. Only inner change offers the opportunity for the perpetrator to escape the whirlpool of wrongdoing that he is now in. Both individuals and society need forgiveness so that grudges, venom, and hatred will not be perpetuated as new suffering.
For the dying SS soldier, feeling remorse in recognition of the monstrousness of his deeds was a good first step. But he could have created much more good by telling his fellow Nazi soldiers to abandon their inhuman behavior. Wiesenthal acted with remarkable dignity. A Buddhist, however, could have said to the dying soldier, “The best thing you can do now is pray that in your future lives you will be able to atone for your crimes by doing as much good as you have done evil.” Knowing that the soldier is destined to undergo much suffering in his future lives, a Buddhist would feel compassion not just for the soldier and his victims, but for all sentient beings who, until they become free from hatred and ignorance, will perpetrate endless cycles of suffering for themselves.
JOSHUA RUBENSTEIN
As we near the close of the most violent century in human history, it seems pointless to consider the case of a mortally wounded Nazi officer who is determined to acknowledge his murder of Jews to a Jew in order to die in peace. By now, the incident he describes to Simon has been outpaced by thousands of similar massacres, from Cambodia to Rwanda, from Indonesia to Bosnia. There have been trials of some perpetrators of official terror and torture, and even more Truth Commissions to document the misdeeds of previous governments, but the number of voluntary, heartfelt confessions is small. In fact, such confessions are so rare that a recent, dramatic example—that of an Argentine naval officer who described his own involvement years before in throwing unconscious political prisoners from airplanes into the sea—reminds us that thousands of his murderous counterparts in Latin America have gotten away with their crimes and today rest soundly in their beds, not unlike so many Nazi perpetrators who grew old in the comfort of their families.
Simon's encounter with a wounded Nazi brings to mind an incident from the war involving Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS and chief of the German police. Speaking to a group of Nazi officers in Pozna′n in 1943, Himmler acknowledged how difficult it must be to commit mass murder and remain a normal human being.
Most of you will know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, when 500 are lying there or when 1000 are lying there. To have stuck this out and at the same time—apart from exceptions due to human weaknesses—to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard.
Himmler's claim reflects the cheap sentimentality about human emotions that so enthralls totalitarian regimes. Hitler was a vegetarian. The Nazis were not senseless brutes. They were good to their mothers, generous to their children, loving to their wives. Historical necessity required them to kill millions of people. The trick was to remain a normal, decent human being, as Himmler proudly explained to his underlings.
I cannot help but think of Himmler's speech when I consider Simon's dilemma. I find myself indifferent to the wounded Nazi's plea for forgiveness. He seems to have been moved more by his approaching death and the severity of his wounds than the enormity of his crimes. According to the story, the Nazi portrays himself as having been genuinely horrified by the massacre, even as he participated in the killing. On top of that, he recalls feeling startled by his unease, as if his years in the Hitler Youth and the SS—an overabundant feast of demagogic hatred and violence—had not prepared him adequately for this vivid, gruesome test of Aryan manhood. Himmler, at least, was clever enough to acknowledge how difficult it must be to murder a thousand people. He would not have been disturbed by the young Nazi's initial misgivings in front of the burning house. They would only confirm for Himmler that this young SS officer was still a “decent human being” who did not allow “human weaknesses” to get in the way of committing mass murder. He succeeded in overcoming them. The misgivings confirmed he was a “civilized German.” Participation in the massacre confirmed he was also a good Nazi.
We know today, if Simon did not at the time, that German soldiers were not punished for refusing to slaughter innocent people. The young Nazi did not have to obey the order to burn and shoot unarmed men, women, and children. The faith he had long abandoned could have returned before he killed rather than later on the threshold of his own death. He could have shot himself in the foot. He could have induced nausea or succumbed to uncontrollable vomiting, as numerous Allied soldiers and journalists experienced when they first came upon piles of decomposing corpses. Of course for us, in the comfort of our peaceful homes, it is useless to suggest how this Nazi could have avoided getting blood on his hands. But it is more preposterous to suggest that after ten years in the Hitler Youth and the SS, including two years of brutal fighting on the Eastern Front, he did not know what was expected of him.
This particular Nazi was brought up in a religious, Catholic home, with normal, loving parents. He was not a teenage delinquent, a natural born sadist, or a brutal, unfeeling individual. German society was now rewarding moral deviance. Even so, individuals still had to make choices for themselves. The choices this young Nazi made betray his true commitments. No one forced him to join the Hitler Youth. In fact, he did so over the objections of his parents. And no one forced him to join the SS. Other Germans, with similar backgrounds and under similar social pressure, joined the White Rose, a clandestine anti-Nazi group, or resisted military service. They were all executed. There was the extraordinary example of Reinhard Heydrich's younger brother Heinz who had been an enthusiastic Nazi. But once he grasped the meaning of the Final Solution (which Reinhard Heydrich had helped to design), he forged one hundred passports to help German Jews escape the Reich before committing suicide himself in 1944 in fear that the Gestapo had uncovered his work. Finally, we know of one SS officer named Kurt Gerstein who used his access to information to try to alert the outside world to Hitler's plans to exterminate the Jews. These Germans experienced profound remorse for the crimes done in their names and took genuine risks on behalf of the persecuted.
Confession and remorse alone are not enough to warrant forgiveness. Even though this Nazi was dying and had neither strength nor opportunity to do some kind of righteous deed, as other remorseful Germans managed to do, his dying wish to beg forgiveness from a scared, vulnerable Jewish prisoner was as much an act of callous egotism as it was a misguided act of contrition.
A sense of humanity requires regard for justice and mercy. When Simon helps the wounded man to drink water or waves an annoying bug from his face, such spontaneous gestures reflect instincts that could well have grown extinct in the camps. The Nazi had committed mass murder. Simon was merciful enough with him. For Simon to grant him forgiveness, as well, would have been a betrayal o
f his and his family's suffering, and all the suffering around him. This was the first and probably last time, after all, that he confronted an utterly helpless Nazi and could have smothered him.
SIDNEY SHACHNOW
Having spent most of my adult life in the military, I know something about war and soldiering. Forty years in the army, thirty-two of them as a Green Beret, have given me a frame of reference to better understand this dying SS soldier. Those of us who have been in battle know that war merely amplifies and exaggerates the good and evil we have inside us. War stimulates courage and the tender emotions we feel for our comrades. At the same time, because it is inhuman, war endangers our humanity.
Throughout history, military training has been devoted to breaking down the deep aversion man feels toward taking another human being's life. In the vast majority of cases the conditioning has proved effective; only then can an individual be called “combat ready.” Societies not only train their soldiers to forego a part of their humanity, they also find ways to provide absolution when they do so. The soldier is honored for his actions. Parades, decorations, veterans’ associations, and memorialization rituals offer psychological compensation for the enormous emotional cost.
But often these things are not enough. In spite of all the training and the proffered absolution, many of us who have killed in the heat of battle have found the act deeply repugnant. I experienced that myself during both of my tours in Vietnam, so severely in one case that I began to see myself as someone I did not want to be. I had broken no rules of war, killed no one who was not trying to kill me, yet what I had done was so disturbing, I feared I might not be able to continue functioning as a soldier. Had there been someone to talk to and ask forgiveness of, I might well have done it.