The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

MOSHE BEJSKI
The subject which I was asked to relate to is complex and complicated, not only
because it involves issues of conscience, morality, psychology, religion, and belief, but also
because the dilemma focuses on two individuals who met under abnormal circumstances and
conditions, and who ostensibly behaved and reacted in a quasi-rational manner based on the
appropriate ethical considerations of human beings created in the image of God.
What is more, I was asked to relate to these events fifty years after they took place. Can
considerations and behaviors be analyzed after so many years and under conditions of peace
and well-being, which include the ability to overcome the spontaneous emotions caused by
unexpected events? Or perhaps the distance of time and different conditions makes it
difficult, if not impossible, to examine what the appropriate behavior should have been
given the emotional state, the severe mental pressure, and the circumstances, which cannot
be reproduced because they have never existed before and because the human mind has
never invented anything like them.
Indeed, the Nazi, the SS man Karl, is a human being who was severely injured and in the
throes of death. As such, and according to rational criteria, he may be worthy not only of
sympathy and understanding for his suffering and his condition, but also of pardon and
forgiveness for past crimes because he had confessed to them, assuming that the confession
was not just formal, but based on true remorse emanating from pangs of conscience.
Yet, for Wiesenthal and others who lived under the same circumstances, Karl was a