Customer Reviews
This is a most incredible book - By: Thomas Koetzsch, 03 Jan 2008 
You are a prisonerin a concentration camp. A dying Nazi soldier asks for your forgiveness. What would you do?
Simon Wiesenthal poses this questionin this book & 53 distinguished men & women give their response as to what they would have donein this situation. The answers I found particularly intriguing were those given by Harry James Cargas & Eugene J. Fischer. I also liked the response given by Harry Wu because it struck me as very down-to-earth. Apart from that I would agree with his belief that it is inconceivable for something like this to happenin China.
All told, I found this book most intriguing & while I was reading it I wondered how I would respond to this request. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if you will wonder, too.
Can repentant perpetrators of atrocities be forgiven? - By: Ralph Blumenau, 14 Dec 2007 Simon Wiesenthal is best known as the man who had been indefatigable & single-mindedin trying to bring Nazi criminals to justice as long as there was a single one of them left. For him this was an absolute moral imperative & something that he felt he owed to the memory of the murdered millions of Jews, of whom Wiesenthal could so easily have been one: he was the survivor of a succession of concentration camps: the Janowska camp outside Lvov, Plaszow (the camp of Schindler's List), Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, & finally Mauthausen. It may come as a surprise to some readers that Wiesenthal was sensitive to the moral problems raised by the issue of forgiveness - yet this book is a moving meditation on that theme. According to his biographer, Hella Pick, Wiesenthal had `always considered it his most important book'.
Cruelty & casual murder were everyday occurrencesin the Janowska camp, & are describedin gut-wrenching detailin the first half of this episode from Wiesenthal's life. While doing slave labour at a military hospital near the camp, he was secretly brought to the death-bed of Karl, a gravely wounded 21-year old SS officer whose conscience was wracked - not just at death's door, but apparently immediately after the event - by his participationin a horrific massacre of Jewsin Dnepropetrovsk. The officer got a nurse to find `a Jew', who happened to be Wiesenthal, to whom he could make his confession & from whom he could seek forgiveness. Wiesenthal wanted to get away; but something - apart from the dying man's grip - made him stay to hear him out. A Catholic priest later told him that that alone should have helped the man to diein peace, since confession & genuine repentance are more important than any absolution. But at the end Wiesenthal left the room without saying anything. Quite apart from the sufferings he was himself undergoing at the hands of the SS just then & from his expectation of death at their hands at any moment, it was not for him to offer forgiveness on behalf of the victims of Dnepropetrovsk. But the issue haunted him - had he done the right thing? After the war he sought out the SS man's mother. The young man had come from a devout & Social Democrat family who were distressed when their son had joined the Hitler Youth & even more when he had volunteered to join the SS. But the mother was convinced that her son had been a good man. Wiesenthal said nothing to her about what her son had done... The short but haunting book charges the reader to put himselfin Wiesenthal's shoes & to ask himself `What would I have done?'
Before publishing his bookin 1969, Wiesenthal sent his manuscript to a number of distinguished thinkers for their response, & the comments of ten of them were includedin the first edition. Further contributions were made by others to the 1997 & 1998 editions: there are now 53 altogether, & they make up nearly two-thirds of the book. They include - to name only the most famous - those of the Dalai Lama, Cardinal König, Primo Levi, Deborah Lipstadt, Herbert Marcuse, & Desmond Tutu.
Some of the respondents seem to me to veer away from the question Wiesenthal had posed, & draw a distinction between forgetting & forgiving; others discuss the question of collective guilt (some reject it; others blame all the bystanders) - interesting, but irrelevantin the context of this story. Almost all agree that whilst individuals can forgive offences committed against themselves, no human can forgivein the name of other victims. In such cases, if the victims cannot be asked because they are dead, perhaps only God can be asked for forgiveness - though one respondent says that God was hardly fit to forgive something which He had after all allowed to happen. And the Jewish tradition has it that even God will not forgive the unpardonable sin of murder. It is unpardonable, because it is the one sin for which reparation is impossible. The Christian tradition, basing itself on Jesus asking God to forgive them, `for they know not what they do', & on the idea that you must hate the sin, but not the sinner, shaped the answer of some Christian respondents. Some say that forgiveness is not only a boon to the penitent, but also for the victim, freeing him from the burden & poison of hate. Two Asian contributors, one a survivor from the Khmer Rouge & the other a victim of the Cultural Revolutionin China, blame only the top leadership, & have some understanding for those who were brainwashed.
One respondent hopes that Karl will rotin hell; others also refuse to accept the genuineness of his repentance, indeed stress the offensiveness of him putting a Jew - chosen not as an individual but picked at random - under the moral burden of hearing the confession & being asked to forgive. Wiesenthal at least saw Karl as an individual & is capable of some compassion towards the dying man & later towards his mother (but one respondent thinks that Wiesenthal did wrong to shield her from the knowledge of what her son had done).
These are just some of the responses to Wiesenthal's question. It is a question addressed to all of us, & it is not surprising that this book has been used as a textin many courses on the Holocaust.
Thought provoking- what would you do? - By: cwheezy@aol.com, 22 Nov 2000 One book that i cant forget. Would you forgive someone who has committed crimes against humanity & yourself. Beautifully written that holds no punches. the author bears his soul & suffers terrible conflict on top of all the suffering that he has endured.
Unforgettable testimony from an unimaginable nightmare - By: , 01 Aug 1999 The book through the Simon Weisenthal's human will for survival takes you through nightmare after nightmare. It is the story of a jew, one amongst millions but probably the most famous survivor of the camps which keeps you engrossed from beginning to end. The lasting effect on myself is that whenever I see a sunflower, my mind always goes straight to the scene of a dying nazi begging his forgiveness with simon looking out of the hospital window overlooking the beauty of the sunflower fields.
Horror & beauty alongside each other strike a poignant reminder of the fight between good & evil.
A story about how a Jew's decision never leaves his mind. - By: , 01 Oct 1998 
The Sunflower, by Simon Wiesenthal, is a story showing that tough decisions can't be made from only a moment's thought. It also brought up the question of whether or not someone has the right to forgive the misdoer of another victim. I would definetly rate it a four, because this book never left my hands. It was a true pageturner.
