The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

last question mentioned above. He obviously believes his silence to have been “right”—the
only decent and honorable reply his particular life allowed him to make. For us today it
becomes quite another matter, the contemplation of that question: we bring to it not the life
described in the story, but lives lived at a far remove from what is described, evoked with
such telling, unnerving detail and power, and alas, authority—that of the one who was,
unforgettably, there. Still, we can attempt to make our individual effort—a gesture of human
solidarity with those who, like the author, survived to render an account of that worst time in
the history of humankind.
With great unease and with no conviction that I would have had a ghost of a chance at
surviving (either morally or physically) the sustained, moment-to-moment terror and
ignominy chronicled in The Sunflower, I gird myself, and leap with this quite mixed, even
contradictory speculation: were I to have survived, as the author did, to experience the
“moment” offered in this moral drama (the call for forgiveness by the Nazi at death's door), I
would have turned away in a tearful rage—even as I (that is, the person I was brought up to
be) would pray for the Lord's forgiveness of that apparently repentant Nazi; pray for him as I
was taught to pray for the forgiveness of any of us who somehow, some way come to realize
the evil of our ways.
Not that I (foolishly, outrageously) would compare any of us ordinary “sinners” to the
Nazi monsters, the leaders or their minions. The point, rather, is the limitations of our lives
—we can only bring ourselves, in all our finiteness, to this table, this symposium that is,
really, the merest footnote to an enormously tragic and melancholy twentieth-century saga:
our talk (as in Shakespeare's “words, words, words”) about how others might have behaved
under circumstances all too dreadfully familiar to them, and one has to say it, all too