~ Martin E. Marty, “Symposium,” The Sunflower

Wiesenthal seems to have replayed this question in his head over and over. Did he act rightly in saying nothing, in essentially refusing to grant the dying SS man’s request for forgiveness? And so, most poignantly, he turns the question over to us . . .

Placed in Wiesenthal’s situation, what would you do?

 We want a God who we fear, a God of wrath and judgment. Let me tell you why.

 I belong to a liberal, secular women’s book club, the kind where you sip on your glass of Chardonnay, eat finger foods and discuss literature. When it was my turn to select the title, I chose Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower.  It’s Mr. Wiesenthal’s telling of being chosen from his work camp’s detail to go to the bedside of a suffering, disfigured and dying SS officer who tells him of the horrific crime he committed against Jewish citizens. The officer begs Mr. Wiesenthal’s forgiveness. The rest of the story concerns Mr. Wiesenthal’s decision, and the book begs the reader to consider what he would do.

As humans, we demand justice.  Suffice it to say, my fellow book club members were incensed.  This SS officer deserved to die without forgiveness and had no right to even ask a Jewish man for forgiveness for crimes committed against other Jews. Then the spotlight turned to me. What would I do, the group’s self proclaimed Christian? I answered that I would be obligated to forgive because Jesus’ death on the cross was for all…for me, for the SS officer. Next to such a beautiful, just and righteous God, the officer and I are no different.  I need grace as much as I need justice.  My fellow readers wanted justice without grace. One woman actually said, “You don’t really believe that hogwash do you?” A few glasses of Chardonnay and these ladies will tell you what they really think.

 Without judgment there is no grace.

 Lord, I confess that I sit in judgment of others when I have no right to. May I step off of my throne to receive your grace with my brothers and sisters. Thank you that you and you alone are holy and just. Thank you for the power of your grace through the death and resurrection of your one and only Son. Thank you for how you work this in my life, moment by moment. Amen

Kathy

In my Jewish Studies class “Suffering, Healing and Redemption,” we were talking about Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower, the story of a Nazi soldier who had shot and killed a young child trying to jump out of a building set on fire by the Nazis.  On his deathbed in an infirmary he calls for Simon Wiesenthal as “a Jew” in order to ask for his forgiveness.  The story ends without Wiesenthal’s answer intentionally so that the question will remain open ended for the reader’s response.

This in itself was not that interesting to me, this story is pretty popular and the glorification of forgiveness is pretty common nowadays.  There are many stories about prisoners forgiving their guards that people seem to love, however my Professor’s response surprised me.  Now before, I go on I want to stress that this professor is one of the best I have ever had, and this class is probably my all time favorite.  He is able to lecture for three hours straight to a class without a single student falling asleep or pulling out a laptop, which is pretty huge.  He is also the most human in a way that I have never encountered before, not in that he is nice and compassionate, but in a way that I hope will be made clear later.

My professor was saying that he himself would forgive the Nazi soldier, right before sending him before a firing squad.  This statement ripped me from my preconceived understanding of forgiveness, and the rest of the lecture served to redefine the infatuation of society towards forgiveness.  I was uncomfortable with the idea of someone going to his death without being forgiven, especially when he was asking for it.  We as people hate to think of having complete responsibility for our actions and decisions.  Although this goes totally against my beliefs concerning nature vs. nurture, liberalism, and systematic oppression, it became more and more attractive to me.  We do have a death penalty, which I despise, and a penal system; however what I’m talking about more is mainstream’s society’s obsession with being forgiven.  Within Christianity “ask and you shall be forgiven” is very prevalent to my knowledge, and the whole concept of Jesus is one intensely concerned with forgiveness.  But why do we ask God for forgiveness when the person we hurt is still around?  Within Judaism you are not allowed to forgive someone for something that was not done to you.  That’s why for a lot of Jewish people the response to Wiesenthal’s story was a simple one.  He didn’t kill me so what right do I have to forgive him?  That should be up to the child who was murdered, not me.  Christians on the other hand are totally comfortable with forgiveness as an abstract entity that can come from anywhere.  It seems as if Christianity is the easiest religion out there, if I steal something from a store all I have to do is ask God for forgiveness and go on my way.  The intense emphasis upon faith and inner beliefs has largely ignored what many other world religions consider to be of primary importance, the body.

Within the West its “I think therefore I am,” in the East its “I do therefore I become.”  For me its when I’m asking for forgiveness for shoplifting and then going on with a clear conscience while the storekeeper is standing behind me with a perplexed look on his face.  We’re always looking upwards for redemption and forgiveness, when we should be looking around us.  We throw words around without thinking of what it actually implies or reveals about our faiths, whatever they may be; while theoretically the beliefs should manifest within the body.

The most important test for a worldview explaining suffering, according to my professor, is its ability to incorporate the vast diversity of human experience.  I believe that this test can and should apply to all facets of any faith, philosophy, or creed; that’s why I put so much importance within the theoretical, because if its possible than it must be taken into account.  When we say, “we can do all things through God who strengthens us,” does that mean when we fail that God is no longer with us?  The question of suffering has been an uncomfortable one for many mainstream religions, because the explanations are hugely ineffective in the face of the craziness of our world.  For me it took a ten year old kid, I love Modern Family, to debunk “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger;” a Holocaust to destroy “divine punishment,” genocide in Rwanda to dismantle “tough love.”  In essence every explanation for the existence of suffering only works within the narrow confines of the community that believes in it.  God is only fair, when you’re the one with all the resources.  God is only loving and compassionate when you’ve grown up in a stable family.  God only expresses faithfulness and steadfastness when you haven’t experienced complete failure.  For every description of God you can find someone who when told of such a divine creator would ask, “where has he been all my life?”  I’ve heard the story of the tapestry a number of times: how from the back a tapestry is a jumble of knots and colors, and only the divine creator in the front can see the image it creates, and it would be abnormally arrogant of me to claim wisdom equal to God’s, but honestly that doesn’t fly any more for me.

The story of the Holocaust was of inconceivable evil and suffering that could not be understood by those in it’s midst, and requires a legitimate response.  Now I definitely have not suffered, or experienced any of these things, nor do I really believe that all of these attributes are truly incompatible within an understanding of God; what I am saying is that there is a huge disconnect between belief and experience that results in a superficial immature faith.  I am also not attacking Christianity over any other; it is simply easier to do since that’s the context from which I am coming from.

I get the sense of true humanness [didn’t know that was a word until spell-check told me I could use it] [I also just found out that spellcheck is not a word, it’s spell-check] from my professor in that in everything he teaches is with an intensely open mind towards the variety of human experience.

I forgot who said this, but your pain becomes suffering when someone else comes along and tries to define your pain for you.  I am the only one who can truly understand what it is I am going through, which goes just as much for others.  For me organized religion is the business of defining other people’s experiences for them.  “You don’t understand your own life, so I will explain it for you.”  I could go on for hours, but I have 10 minutes left in class.  My professor ended the lecture by saying “the soldier may have been going through extenuating circumstances, but we all go through extenuating circumstances; is it wrong to expect people to rise above them?”  [I think I’m butchering his words but that’s the gist of what he said]  Throughout Germany, Poland and Austria the police were charged with rounding up Jews throughout the community, taking them out, forcing them to dig their own graves, and then shooting them in the head.  Now these were normal everyday people, not members of the SS trained to be hardened soldiers.  They had to get drunk everyday before going out to do their work, because they couldn’t handle their heavy consciences.   But at the same time there was not a single case of any individual who refused to do what they were assigned, of which there were a good number, being prosecuted or punished for their decisions.  The world in which I live cannot handle the thought of that soldier going to his death knowing he was not forgiven.  Death bed conversions are totally legitimate in my book probably because I know there’s a possibility that I might try one of my own someday “just in case.”

This has been the longest one yet, but I have to add my disclaimer:  I know I say Christians say this and that, and Jews (Sorry if that’s offensive but it sounds better than saying Jewish people) believe this, but I don’t mean to generalize for all Christians and Jews, it just makes for faster writing.  And what I’m talking about aren’t really hard and fast rules of my life, just something that interested me; I’m not actually that mad or worried about the state of the world I just waste a lot of time at my computer.  My anger/frustration is more a product of my own laziness and unwillingness to work than it is reflection and analysis.

Believe it or not, I had never read Anne Frank before. It surprised me…but not in a good way.

Anne’s story begins on her 13th birthday, in 1942, when she receives her diary. Very shortly after that, her family goes into hiding, where they stay for the next two years. World War II ended in 1945, and as I continued getting caught up in the story, the suspense building, I waited for the moment when the Franks and Van Daans (their “neighbors”, also in hiding in the same house) could step out of hiding and feel the sun on their faces. It was with shock that I turned one of the last pages, only to find that the book ends abruptly after an entry on the 1st of August, 1944. With growing horror, I read the short epilogue. Turns out that the Franks and Van Daans didn’t make it to the end of the war. Shortly after the last diary entry, the families were discovered and put in concentration camps, where all of them died, with the exception of Mr. Frank, Anne’s father. I’ll be honest with you: I wasn’t expecting Anne Frank to die. Having read The Sunflower, Night, and The Hiding Place, I’m used to Holocaust survivors. All the books are written by the survivors! It’s actually a phenomenon that we have this book, since the author died in a camp, before the end of the war. Her diary was found in the house where she and her family had been hiding, and was later published.

Anyway, as I read entry after entry, I couldn’t help but wonder what it must have been like to stay always inside, to live in forced quietude, constant subconscious fear of discovery, and uncertainty as to when the war would end? We, who have the help of the history books, know that the war was oh-so-close to being over in June of 1944, but Anne’s diary voices not only her hopes and desires for the end of the war, but also the total ignorance of when it would happen. So sad.

I found the diary interesting; I could see Anne growing up as it went. She started, at 13, being a little shallow and with a version of the typical teenager I’m-always-right-and-no-one-understands-me mindset. There were also a lot of day-to-day life descriptions toward the beginning. However, as the book drew to a close, Anne’s thoughts deepened and became more pensive. The last entry, in fact, was a very introspective look at her own schizophrenia. One of the statements Anne makes toward the end was an interesting look at her views on living:

“How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the whole day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then, without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you acheive quite a lot in the course of time.”

One of Anne’s greatest wishes was to go on living even after her death. When she says this in her diary, I doubt she thought for a single moment that she would die before she turned 16. But as it happens, G-d has granted her desire and used her diary to open the eyes of millions to the truth of what happened to the Jewish people during the Nazi regime.

This is a must-read for any student of the Holocaust.

I have just finished Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower. It was an amazing read! Very deep, very thought-provoking. I would definitely recommend it. My complete thoughts on the book are available on this site, in the orange box on the home page. Far too long to include in a post. However, reading it did bring a question to my mind.

For background, Simon had this experience with a dying Nazi soldier, who asked him for forgiveness. He ended up walking away without saying anything. He seems to dwell on this reaction (or non-reaction) quite a bit, as he tells his friends, visits the soldier’s mother after the war, and finally by even writing this book. All this certainly telegraphs a feeling of guilt on his part. A few of the respondees actually mention him feeling guilty about what he did or didn’t say. So my question is this: setting aside this particular case, and speaking in general terms, do we feel guilt if we did the right thing? If you are presented with a situation, and you respond in accordance with what G-d would want, will you ever feel guilty about it?

We just passed International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2010. Those who knew about it and cared about what happened so many years ago to so many people, stopped to remember it. Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah: Day of the Whirlwind – Holocaust Day) falls on Nissan 27, commemorated on April 12 this year.

So here is my plan: between the two dates, I am going to focus my reading on Holocaust themed literature, especially true stories. I want to bring the Holocaust home to my heart and mind, so that I can truly remember when Yom HaShoah arrives. I can’t pretend I’ll know what it was like to be a Jewish prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, but at least I will have caught a brief glimpse. Just as we speak of the bondage in and exodus from Egypt as if we ourselves were there, I want to build a bridge in my mind to the Holocaust and it’s horrors.

My list of books is as follows (please feel free to suggest others I have not put on here):

• The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, by Simon Wiesenthal.
  Wiesenthal tackles the question of the possibilities and limits of forgiveness. The first part relates the story of how Wiesenthal, as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, was brought before a dying SS trooper, who explained his actions and asked for forgiveness, which Wiesenthal could not bring himself to bestow. In the second section, Wiesenthal presents the story to an array of leading intellectuals and asks, “What would you have done?”
• Night, by Elie Wiesel.
  An autobiographical account of a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the G-d in whom he once so fervently believed have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life’s essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel’s lifelong project to bear witness for those who died. Follow-up novels in this trilogy (Dawn and Day) are also recommended.
• Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry.
  The evacuation of Jews from Nazi-held Denmark is one of the great untold stories of World War II. On September 29, 1943, word got out in Denmark that Jews were to be detained and then sent to the death camps. Within hours the Danish resistance, population and police arranged a small flotilla to herd 7,000 Jews to Sweden. Lois Lowry fictionalizes a true-story account to bring this courageous tale to life. She brings the experience to life through the eyes of 10-year-old Annemarie Johannesen, whose family harbors her best friend, Ellen Rosen, on the eve of the round-up and helps smuggles Ellen’s family out of the country.
• The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom.
  Corrie ten Boom was a woman admired the world over for her courage, her forgiveness, and her memorable faith. In World War II, she and her family risked their lives to help Jews escape the Nazis, and their reward was a trip to Hitler’s concentration camps. But she survived and was released–as a result of a clerical error–and now shares the story of how faith triumphs over evil. For 35 years, Corrie’s dramatic life story, full of timeless virtues, has prepared readers to face their own futures with faith, relying on God’s love to overcome, heal, and restore. Now releasing in a thirty-fifth anniversary edition for a new generation of readers, The Hiding Place tells the riveting story of how a middle-aged Dutch watchmaker became a heroine of the Resistance, a survivor of Hitler’s death camps, and one of the most remarkable evangelists of the 20th century.
• The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak.
  Death himself narrates the World War II-era story of Liesel Meminger from the time she is taken, at age nine, to live in Molching, Germany, with a foster family. The child arrives having just stolen her first book–although she has not yet learned how to read–and her foster father uses it to lull her to sleep when she’s roused by regular nightmares about her younger brother’s death. Across the ensuing years of the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Liesel collects more stolen books as well as a peculiar set of friends. Zusak not only creates a mesmerizing and original story but also writes with poetic syntax, causing readers to deliberate over phrases and lines, even as the action impels them forward. Death is not a sentimental storyteller, but he does attend to an array of satisfying details, giving Liesel’s story all the nuances of chance, folly, and fulfilled expectation that it deserves.

Read with me? I’m about 1/3 of the way through The Sunflower, and I am not going in any particular order. My goal is to complete this list by April 12. Let’s go, avid readers!

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Jews are not responsible for forgiving an act committed against others, but are only able to forgive acts committed by man against themselves. We are not the collective whole, or the collective spine in the area of forgiveness.  Simon Wiesenthal brings that realm of thought to the forefront in bold discussion and brutal honesty, and appears to wrestle with his own decision. The fact that he didn’t fulfill the last request of a dying man haunted him throughout his years. Yet, as a Jewish individual, was forgiveness of acts against another person an expectation of him in the Jewish community? Questions and more questions penetrate the pages, and the Jewish ethics and morals resound through the silence of The Sunflower.

Read the complete review here.

**Attention participants:  Remember to email us a link to your reviews, and we’ll post them here so we can see what everyone is reading!**

The actual column, written by the thoughtful but spunky Melisha Regier for the Sunflower: http://ow.ly/D6iq

Does the column stand without anecdotes? A good story can be nice every once and awhile, but the column needs to cover topics more broadly than one event or person. It doesn’t matter how interesting your own love life is, the column is about informing the readers not personal ego stroking.

Does the column contain actionable information? Or, in other words, could at least a subsection of the readership reasonably take the information and use it to alter their behavior? If the information in the column couldn’t reasonably make a difference in someone’s life, it still might make a great story— but at the cost of providing information that could be the impetus for personal improvement.

Ammendment 1: Does the column target the majority of the readership? While it’s worthwhile to address issues faced by minority groups, do so with the intention of informing the majority about the issue instead of speaking directly to the minorities being covered. If you’re addressing a minority issue, you’ll have to defend yourself to the majority- you might as well save the effort and include the defense in the original column.