The Sunflower Book Report

774 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Effect of the Holocaust

The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal is a non-fiction novel, an autobiography of an event in his life. The novel is a firsthand account of his experience as a concentration camp prisoner under the Nazi regime. This took place during one of the most significant events in American history, the Holocaust, and he was sent to a concentration camp for being Jewish. He explains about how horrible life conditions are for the Jews in the concentration camps and expands on what they had to go through. While at a hospital one day based on orders and work he had to do, he was motioned to a room where there was a dying SS man due to injuries sustained in battle named Karl. He is brought to his bedside and Karl asks Wiesenthal for absolution/forgiveness for …show more content…

I am German, but I am completely against the acts the Nazis committed against the Jews in the Holocaust. I would never personally be able to bring myself to commit horrific acts and murders against another human being like the Nazis did in mass numbers. I personally agree with Simon not forgiving Karl because it is very hard to forgive a man for committing such cruel and barbaric acts against other human beings. Yes, it is true that Karl may have been forced by leaders or higher powers of the Nazi regime to carry out these horrific acts, but he still could have refused. He still went along with it though, even if he may have been killed if he had not done so. He still committed genocide and murdered/tortured other innocent human beings for no specific reason at all. Also, we have to bring into the picture that Karl would still get a sunflower put by his grave after he died, while Wiesenthal will not because he is Jewish. Simon uses the image of the sunflower to represent Karl’s relationship with God. There will be light from God upon the dark graves of the cruel/dark soldiers who committed the horrific acts against the Jews. This can be another reason why Wiesenthal cannot forgive Karl, because his afterlife and relationship with God is certain,

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower

    761 Words  | 2 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Morals and Forgiveness in Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower

    1576 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Windflower By Gabrielle Roy

    487 Words  | 1 Pages

    In the novel “Windflower” by Gabrielle Roy, we are introduced to Elsa Kumachuck, a young First Nations girl living in a small town characterized by its bare, inhospitable environment and a community divided between the Inuit people and the Caucasians. As the plot unveils we are given a graphic scene where our protagonist is raped by an American man. The pregnancy, which is the result of the sexual assault, produces a child who becomes the focal point of the novel as well a source of marvel for many of the inhabitants of the town. As Elsa tries to raise the child alone she finds it difficult to resist the influence of the community they are stuck in: from the boy’s ethnicity, to her own heritage but most significantly her setting. Whenever Elsa

    Read More

  • Response To The Sunflower

    479 Words  | 1 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Loss of Faith and Religion in Ellie Wiesel’s Night

    1731 Words  | 4 Pages

    The Holocaust survivor Abel Herzberg has said, “ There were not six million Jews murdered; there was one murder, six million times.” The Holocaust is one of the most horrific events in the history of mankind, consisting of the genocide of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, mentally handicapped and many others during World War II. Adolf Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany, and his army of Nazis and SS troops carried out the terrible proceedings of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, and suffers a relentless “night” of terror and torture in which humans were treated as animals. Wiesel discovers the “Kingdom of Night” (118), in which the history of the Jewish people is altered. This is Wiesel’s “dark time of life” and through his journey into night he can’t see the “light” at the end of the tunnel, only continuous dread and darkness. Night is a memoir that is written in the style of a bildungsroman, a loss of innocence and a sad coming of age. This memoir reveals how Eliezer (Elie Wiesel) gradually loses his faith and his relationships with both his father (dad), and his Father (God). Sickened by the torment he must endure, Wiesel questions if God really exists, “Why, but why should I bless him? Because he in his great might, had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? (67). Throughout the Holocaust, Wiesel’s faith is not permanently shattered. Although after his father dies, his faith in god and religion is shaken to the core, and arguably gone. Wiesel, along with most prisoners, lose their faith in God. Wiesel’s loss of religion becomes the loss of identity, humanity, selfishness, and decency.

    Read More

  • Loss of Faith in Night by Elie Wiesel

    428 Words  | 1 Pages

    Eliezer Wiesel loses his faith in god, family and humanity through the experiences he has from the Nazi concentration camp.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Film Hitler's Children

    1168 Words  | 3 Pages

    With the divide of the Jewish people saying that they are Jewish first and German after or just living in Germany, there is a deep fissure that neither the children of the victims or the children of the perpetrators want to cross. Another reason is that the younger generation of Non-Jewish Germans are tired of being blamed for something that they had no part of and weren’t even born during(etd). With people, such as Eldad Beck who said he was not ready to forgive, there is an understanding that scars are still deep within the Jewish people. There is no one size fits all fix for the pain and the anger and the guilt that has come out of the holocaust. The anger and guilt has led to a divide and mistrust between the Jewish and German people that is deep. The “us” and “them” mentality that has been in German-Jewish relationship cannot be fixed or at least smoothed out with monuments and trials. The only way to fix it is to have cool head dialogue that can lead to understanding which is a lot easier said than done. There may never be true reconciliation between these to two people with so much dark history in their past, but there have been signs that it could one day

    Read More

  • The Man in the High Castle: Criticisms of Reality and Dictatorship by Philip K. Dick

    1302 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Edward Flannery Summary

    193 Words  | 1 Pages

    Edward H. Flannery, an author of a philosophical essay in the sunflower Symposium is a Roman Catholic priest. The page number he is found in pg. (135). Flannery argues that Simon Wiesenthal should have forgiven the dying S.S soldier because Simon Wiesenthal has previously written earlier that he still thought about the Nazi soldier which convinced Edward that he still thought about the Nazi soldier which convinced Edward. H. Flannery that Simon Wiesenthal shows remorse for not forgiving the dying soldier. For example, Edward. H.Flannery argues “His subsequent behavior gives eloquent testimony to the ambivalence that posses him. His decision to visit Karl’s mother gives evidence of his uncertainty and guilt feelings and the actual meeting gives

    Read More

  • Character Analysis Of Simon Wiesenthal In 'The Sunflower'

    453 Words  | 1 Pages

    The book the Sunflower is about Simon Wiesenthal that is forced to a concentration camp because he was Jewish. As all the other prisoners he was living his hard life normally till one day he and groups of other Jews were taken to a hospital to clean up. While walking to the hospital he looks away from the people passing by on the street on the street in, in fear he will see someone he’s known. Soon after he comes across a cemetery for Nazi soldiers, on each grave he sees a sunflower. Simon soon grows jealous for he knows when he dies there will be no sunflower connecting him to the world of the living. He thinks that the sunflower carries symbolism to him, for he knows he will be dumped in a mass grave like all the other Jews.

    Read More

  • Forgiveness In The Sunflower By Simon Weisenthal

    846 Words  | 2 Pages

    HIs silence, I believe, was the best thing Simon could have done for Karl at that moment. The silence he provided him let the SS man think about whatever he needed. It gave him time to reminisce about his life overall, not just his foolish mistakes. Many of the responders who reviewed Simon’s story stated that he was not entitled to forgiving the SS man. I agree, since Simon may not have experienced the same emotions that the little boy suffered through. Simon never met the little boy nor did he know him personally, therefore he has no idea as to whether the little boy would forgive or not. Due to Karl’s actions, the little boy will never experience the little things that make life worth living, like going to school, falling in love, and growing elderly. The people Karl affected are gone and will never have the opportunity to hear his apologetic words. In regards to every event that occurred, we must remember what every individual experienced during the Holocaust. Their sufferings and the culprit must be remembered. The hatred felt between all races must not be forgotten, for it will reoccur once again.With the circumstances that the Jewish community was given, I believe that Mr. Weisenthal should not change a single thing about his actions. He had the courage to walk away, and although these memories haunted him until his very last moment, he should

    Read More

  • The Sunflower Simon Wiesenthal Personal Response

    1136 Words  | 3 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Book Report On Flowers For Algernon

    549 Words  | 2 Pages

    How do you think a friend should treat you? I think friends should treat you with respect and the utmost care. That’s why I’ll be telling you about Flowers for Algernon. Flowers for Algernon is a short story written by Daniel Keyes. The story is about a man named Charlie Gordon who has cognitive delay. He wants to be smart so he can have friends, so when an operation is offered he jumps eagerly at it. He is tested with the ink blot test and mazes against a mouse named Algernon who had a similar operation performed on him. The operation takes a while to work, but his intelligence skyrockets. Algernon dies around this time after becoming aggressive and losing intelligence. Charlie’s intelligence decreases at the same rate it increased and he is left slightly smarter than before the operation. He leaves his town and isn’t heard from again.

    Read More

  • Jordan Tannahill's Concord Florals

    869 Words  | 2 Pages

    Playwriting can be a difficult task when one wants to reach out to the audience and become attached to the story. A way of conveying a story to the audience is by finding inspiration and building off of it. According to the Canadian Stage’s website, Jordan Tannahill’s Concord Floral is a re-imagining of The Decameron, a novel written by Giovaccni Boccaccio. In The Decameron, the story tells of seven girls and three boys who take refuge to a secluded villa outside of Florence, Italy to avoid the plague. There they tell each other stories to pass the time as they are there. In Concord Floral, the play tells the story of ten teenagers who escape to an abandoned greenhouse known as Concord Floral and the events that unfold around it (Maga 2016). As the play is being presented to the audience, there are multiple similarities to the novel that

    Read More

  • Sunflowers: The Flower That Can Adapt, Diversity, and Substainability

    1099 Words  | 3 Pages

    The sunflower, original only to the Americas, has become one of the most important plants throughout the world due to its adaptability, diversity, and sustainability. It is a key component in cooking, human health, soil detoxification, and has been use in medicine, art and poetry.

    Read More

More about The Sunflower Book Report

Open Document