The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

from the Lvov Ghetto, who he had known well and cared for until he disappeared.
There are only two people in the death chamber, but each one represents an entirely
different world: One—all the evil, and the horrible crimes that, up till the moment he was
wounded, he himself perpetrated, and his comrades and the regime he is a part of continue to
perpetrate, against human beings; and the other—the emotionally and physically broken
victim of those crimes, whose pain is too much to bear because of what they have done to
him, his family, and his people. Whose forgiveness was being sought—that of a Jew whose
fate had already been sealed by the dying man's comrades, who did not then feel, and most
likely never felt, remorse.
I never had an encounter with a dying SS man as Wiesenthal unwittingly did, but I shared
his experiences in all other respects. My family was also deported to Belzec along with all
the other residents of my town. I endured all the hellish nightmare of the war years in forced
labor camps, in concentration and extermination camps. I saw so much death, so many
executions. I was starved to death, I was degraded, made to feel subhuman; and I have
forgotten none of the atrocities carried out against the Jews by the Nazi regime.
I am afraid that anyone who has been there and experienced it all would not have behaved
any differently than Wiesenthal did then, and not only because the circumstances prevented
him from thinking and reacting in a rational and deliberate manner, based on moral,
religious, humanitarian, or philosophical considerations. But how can forgiveness be asked
of someone whose death sentence will soon be carried out by the dying man's partners in
crime, who are part of the same regime, when the dying person himself admits that he too has
been committing these same crimes against the Jewish people and was only stopped when
the hand of God overtook him.