The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

MATTHEW FOX
Simon Wiesenthal is a truth-teller who shakes up our conscience. Like many rabbis of
old, including Jesus, he does not tell us so much about right from wrong; rather, he puts us in
a place where our conscience must make decisions. We thank him for this. But we also curse
him—for his challenge is very difficult. What would we have done—what should we have
done—were we in his unenviable position in the hospital with a dying SS man?
Let us remember his circumstances. Simon did not know if he himself was going to live
through the day; or the week; or the month. (In fact, most of his friends did not survive the
camps and eighty-nine close relatives perished.) And still this one young SS man, in a kind
of command performance, summoned a Jew to confess to. He wanted Simon to somehow
relieve him of his guilt. We have to remember that the sin that so shook up Karl the SS man,
his observing and participating in the slaughter of innocents in a torched house, was not his
only sin. It was the nightmare that kept him awake at night, but it was by no means his only
sin. Long before that fateful night, this SS man had participated time and time again in the
mass hysteria and racial hatred that spawned the death camps and the war and many other
deaths of innocents even before the deaths in Dnepropetrovsk. He did not express repentance
for one-can-only-guess-how-many acts of hatred and sadism and antisemitism he committed
on other occasions as an SS man—only for the one gruesome occasion which interfered with
his sleep.
This young man as an enthusiastic Nazi had participated in, among other things, the death