Another week gone, and another book read. This week while sitting in a New Orleans airport waiting for the flight back to Newark I sat down with The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal. The story tells the tale of a man in a German concentration camp during the Holocaust. One day while working outside of a hospital a nurse leads him into a room where a dying Nazi confesses his sins and asks for forgiveness. The book ends with Wiesenthal telling the reader, “to ask yourself the crucial questions, “What would I have done,”” (Wiesenthal, 1969)?
As a man of the Jewish faith, I thought the story would be an interesting and emotional read to see what my Jewish brethren had gone through. Throughout Hebrew school we have heard the horror stories, but The Sunflower was a different kind of horror, an emotional horror if you will. The enemy who has murdered millions of innocent lives asks you to forgive him for his crimes. What is one supposed to say to that? Simon Wiesenthal’s first hand experience shows both the thinking and actions that one might go through if put in this situation. The back of the book is filled with interesting criticisms from authors, teachers, and world leaders. Of the most interesting is Eugene J. Fisher. who believes that "we have no right to put Jewish survivors in the impossible moral position of offering forgiveness, implicitly, in the name of the six million. Placing a Jew in this anguished position further victimizes him or her. This, in my reading, was the final sin of the dying Nazi" (pp. 132-33, 1997). While reading the book all I could think about was what Simon was going to do, but looking at the big picture Fisher hits the nail on the head. The Nazi while in his deathbed is still able to inflict damage on the suffering Jews. He poses a question that is able to eat away at Simon’s surface, years later coming back to the for front of his life still in search of an answer.
If I were put in this situation how would I react? What I find more important is how would today’s generation act? I wanted to pose myself this interesting question for the simple fact that today’s generation is not nearly as religious or up to date on their respective faiths. I was one of those “bad” Jewish children who went to temple had the bar mitzvah and basically cut off all ties with the temple and religious aside form holidays I’m forced to attend. While I don’t necessarily think religion is a bad thing I believe you can have a “connection” with God by yourself and you do not need a church or synagogue to pray, it can be a personal thing. Also, I believe religious brings out the worst in people. For years different groups have been fighting and killing in the name of God. I don’t think that’s what God had in mind. Students nowadays believe “God is an afterthought at best. And the afterlife is, as one of my students told me, "on the back burner,”” (Prothero, 2008). With the millennial generation losing faith in religion it makes The Sunflower that more important. The more I think about it, the more it pains me to tell say that I would probably for give the dying Nazi in today’s day and age due to the simple fact that I don’t have that religious connection that people back then did.
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