Not See Atrocities
The act of forgiving a murder is out of the question for most people. Simon is confronted with this very dilemma in The Sunflower. Karl, a dying Nazi, is asking forgiveness from a Jew, the narrator. The narrator leaves the dying Nazi with no answer, leaving him with an agonizing thought of whether he did or did not do the right thing. Due to the fact both Karl and the narrator’s psychological well-being is affected by not only wartime but other extenuating factors, the narrator should grant Karl forgiveness, as this dying man is an individual who is genuinely repenting for the crimes he has committed. Forgiveness will allow Karl to die with piece of mind while the narrator will continue life with a stable and clear conscience.
The narrator believes Karl is not just atoning but is genuine in his repentance. Though Karl never formally apologizes, “in his confession [there is] true repentance” (Wiesenthal 53). Throughout the confession Karl shows many signs of honesty and remorse; his words are harsh as he confesses his sins and are forced out even through the pain, Karl holds the narrators hand throughout the whole confession, and the fact that he is asking for forgiveness from a Jew (28-79). Sven Alkalaj agrees that forgiveness is possible when "there is a genuine recognition of guilt" (105). The narrator should grant him forgiveness because of the blatantly obvious guilt in Karl’s confession.
Karl states his confession is “a letter without an answer…” indeed, the letter is without address (Wiesenthal 53). Though Karl is confessing his sins to the narrator, he must confess to those he has sinned upon for absolute forgiveness. “[Who] had [Karl] to turn to? None of those he had wronged [are] still alive” (81...
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...st in his desperate plea for forgiveness. Therefore, the narrator should allow Karl his temporary forgiveness until God and the ones sinned upon can make their personal decision of whether his sins are indeed justifiable. Forgiveness is crucial for a clear conscience and peace of mind for the both of them. However, all of this is arguable by the fact today’s experiences are incomparable to those of Hitler’s times. One cannot begin to place one in each other’s shoes and know exactly how to respond to the events happening. One can only guess how they would respond but until they are in that moment, all plausible reasoning can change. Nevertheless, forgiveness continues to be an aspect of everyday life in every century.
Works Cited
Wiesenthal, Simon. The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. 1969. New
York: Schocken Books, 1998. Print.
The author of my essay is Simon Balic and he is a historian and culturologist. The title of the work is, Sunflower Symposium (109-111). Balic wrote this essay thirty years after The Sunflower was written. Balic argues that he does not forgive the sufferer, although he does feel some remorse. The author supports and develops the thesis in a chronological order in order to take the reader through exactly what was seen, heard, and thought of during this time. Both Weisenthal and Balic had a liable reason to not forgive the soldier, “There are crimes whose enormity cannot be measured. Rectifying a misdeed is a matter to be settled between the perpetrator and the victim” (Wiesenthal 54). Through this, Balic was trying to speak to his audience of fellow historians.
Simon Wiesenthal’s book The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness spoke to me about the question of forgiveness and repentance. Simon Wiesenthal was a Holocaust prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. He experienced many brutal and uneasy experiences that no human being should experience in their lifetime and bear to live with it. Death, suffering, and despair were common to Simon Wiesenthal that he questioned his own religious faith because he asks why would his God allow the Holocaust happen to his people to be slaughter and not do anything to save them. During Simon Wiesenthal time as a Jewish Holocaust, Simon was invited to a military hospital where a dying Nazi SS officer wanted to have a conversation. The Nazi SS officer told Simon his story of his life and confesses to Simon of his horrific war crimes. Ultimately, the SS officer wanted forgiveness for what he done to Simon’s Jewish people. Simon Wiesenthal could not respond to his request, because he did not know what to do with a war criminal that participate in mass genocide to Simon’s people. Simon Wiesenthal lives throughout his life on asking the same crucial question, “What would I have done?” (Wiesenthal 98). If the readers would be on the exact situation as Simon was
Forgiveness is not an action that should be taken for granted. Nor should it be easily accepted without a second thought. It was strong of Simon to refuse to give Karl an answer to his request. “Possibly, there are circumstances in which forgiving is a temptation, a promise of relief that might be morally dubious. Indeed, the refusal to forgive may represent the more demanding moral accomplishment” (Brudholm 2). Simon did not give into the temptation to give a dying man the easy answer he sought and say that he forgave him without thinking it over. Karl assumed that he would be forgiven, even though he did not express much remorse about what he had done. Because he did not automatically tell Karl that he forgave him, Simon never had ...
Thank you Mr. Wiesenthal for letting me be able to read and respond to your book The Sunflower. The Sunflower has showed me how ruthless it was for Jewish people in the Holocaust. In your book Karl, an SS solider, tries to get your forgiveness for the wrong he has done to the Jewish population. For a person to ask for forgiveness means that they have realized that they have done wrong and want to repent for their mistakes. The big question in your book was “What would you do?” I would’ve done exactly what you did I wouldn’t have granted the solider my forgiveness because he didn’t deserve it.
He experiences numerous people being hanged, beaten, and tortured daily which changes the amount of faith and trust that he has in Humanity and God. He sees faithful and courageous people crumble in front of his own eyes before their lives are stolen. Towards the end of the book, Wiesel is in the hospital at the camp for surgery on his leg and the man in the bed next to him says something that is bitterly true, “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people,” (Wiesel 81). Wiesel doesn’t argue with this, which shows that he had lost his faith in humanity, and doesn’t know who to trust. Wiesel is also naive and vulnerable at the beginning of the book. He refuses to touch the food at the ghetto and strongly considers rebelling against the officers at the Concentration camps. At the same time, he is also a strong and fairly well-fed boy who does not grow tired easily. He is shocked that the world is letting these barbarities occur in modern times. Over time, he grows accustomed to the beatings and animal-like treatment that is routine at the camps. “I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked….. Had I changed that much so fast?”
The unimaginable actions from German authorities in the concentration camps of the Holocaust were expected to be tolerated by weak prisoners like Wiesel or death was an alternate. These constant actions from the S.S. officers crushed the identification of who Wiesel really was. When Wiesel’s physical state left, so did his mental state. If a prisoner chose to have a mind of their own and did not follow the S.S. officer’s commands they were written brutally beaten or even in severe cases sentenced to their death. After Wiesel was liberated he looked at himself in the mirror and didn’t even recognize who he was anymore. No prisoner that was a part of the Holocaust could avoid inner and outer turmoil.
The position to choose between forgiving one’s evil oppressor and letting him die in unrest is unlike any other. The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal explores the possibilities and limitations of forgiveness through the story of one Jew in Nazi Germany. In the book, Wiesenthal details his life in the concentration camp, and the particular circumstance in which a dying Nazi asks him for forgiveness for all the heinous acts committed against Jews while under the Nazi regime. Wiesenthal responds to this request by leaving the room without giving forgiveness. The story closes with Wiesenthal posing the question, “What would you have done?” Had I been put in the position that Wiesenthal was in, I would ultimately choose to forgive the Nazi on the basis
In Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower on the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness the author is asked to fulfill a dying solider last wish to forgive him because of the crimes he has committed against the Jewish people of the Holocaust. When Wiesenthal is asked for forgiveness, he simply leaves the room. Wiesenthal states that the encounter with the dying man left “a heavy burden” (Wiesenthal 55) on him. The confessions in which he admitted to have “profoundly disturbed [him]” (Wiesenthal 55). As Wiesenthal tries to make sense of what he has encountered he begins to make excuses for why the man might have done what he did. He say...
He told of being on a balcony, seeing people pass by, and wanting to have a machine gun to release his anger. His hatred for the Germans and what they had done to him and his family was very evident. On a personal level Thomas Buergenthal learned to forgive, because it benefited him more than staying bitter. He sums this up when talking about himself and his mother by saying, “ I doubt that we would have been able to preserve our sanity had we remained consumed by hatred for the rest of our lives.” The process of forgiving took a lot of time. He eventually realized “that one cannot hope to protect mankind from crimes such as those that were visited upon us unless one struggles to break the cycle of hatred and violence that invariably leads to more suffering by innocent human beings.” This realization lead Buergenthal to go to law school and work in multiple human rights organizations and courts. He felt fit to serve in such a place as he was a victim of the greatest infringement on human rights in
He knows that by confessing he would be admitting to himself that he is not extraordinary and to him dealing with that suffering is much more difficult than the suffering he endures without telling.
Confessions by Augustine is a theological autobiography about confessions. What did it mean to confess? To confess in Augustine’s time was meant both to give an account of fault to God and to praise God. Augustine talks about his sinfulness and his faithfulness to his God. Confessions is a story of Augustine’s life, starting from his birth to his mothers death. “You have made us for yourselves, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”(Confessions, 1.1.1)
In the passage, Thomas Quincy asked the reader to forgive his unacceptable actions. He explained how having one’s error is awful, especially when he compared how his errors are exposed by others. Naturally, everyone would cover their mistake and isolate from others to avoid their wrongdoing being revealed. At the end, he confessed he has faced troubles throughout his life and the drug took all his attention. This passage’s central argument is that confessing about an event does not mean to get rid of guilt, but to let everyone else to know so we can all avoid a similar situation he has. This means we can avoid a type problem that could restrain us. And can also be beneficial for others by hearing an experience of another.
It is your soul that I am buying for you… and I give it to God!”(33). This act and the power of forgiveness is the what catalyzed and drove Jean Valjean’s transformation from cruel and bitter to benevolent, virtuous, and selfless; moreover, impacting the way he acted towards the poor and needy, and changing his mindset for the rest of his life. For Javert, forgiveness shatters his perception of the world viewable only as black and white and where justice is when people get what they deserve in the name of the law, an idea of rigid and severe retribution. Hugo through his many examples of the power of forgiveness is poignantly portraying how mercy can transform an individual regardless of their societal ranking. Jean Valjean would have been wrong in not forgiving Javert, for the actions of the Bishop show, that an individual should show forgiveness to others no matter the actions of their past, for the true significance of forgiveness is to spark transformation in
In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Josef K. is guilty; his crime is that he does not accept his own humanity. This crime is not obvious throughout the novel, but rather becomes gradually and implicitly apparent to the reader. Again and again, despite his own doubts and various shortcomings, K. denies his guilt, which is, in essence, to deny his very humanity. It is for this crime that the Law seeks him, for if he would only accept the guilt inherent in being human (and, by so doing, his humanity itself), both he and the Law could move on.
This idea should also help us understand the apparently lopsided and unusual structure of the text. The first nine Books of the Confessions are devoted to the story of Augustine's life up to his mother's death, but the last four Books make a sudden, lengthy departure into pure theology and philosophy. This shift should be understood in the same context as the double meaning of 'confessions'—for Augustine, the story of his sinful life and redemption is in fact a profoundly philosophical and religious matter, since his story is only one exampl...