The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

abstract. They were as vilely opaque as those bandages with yellow stains that later covered
his hollowed eyes, and they made him a criminal against humanity long before he committed
the crime for which he importunes you for forgiveness. He could not even see through the
bandages the Jews with whom he was very well acquainted: the family doctor, for example,
whose fate elicited his parents’ concern, but not his. Damnable opacity. You, Mr.
Wiesenthal, struggled to assemble a human being from behind those odious bandages that
concealed his face. But he, swathed in his more-than-odious abstractions, did not see
through them to the human faces on the other side.
Until he did. In a building crammed with Jews on fire. His shocked reaction to the sight is
itself bewildering. An SS man surprised to see Jews being murdered? Had he never grasped
the intent of the statements equating Jews with vermin? What other concrete realizations
were such abstractions meant to entail if not those three souls set ablaze; if not the fine detail
that Zyklon B, the gas by which those three multiplied by millions were exterminated in their
death chambers, was a roach poison?
But strangely enough, the sight of those particular slaughtered innocents shocked him. The
smallest detail clinging to real life, perhaps the undeniably human gesture of the father
shielding his little son's eyes, seems to have loosened (I do not say removed) the filthy
bandages from that SS man's eyes. It is, on a certain level, a far more significant conversion
than his prior substitution of abstract Nazism for abstract Christianity.
And a conversion it was. This SS man was certainly a better person, which is to say a
worse Nazi, for seeing those murdered three for the terrible sight that they were. He was a
better man yet for seeing their faces before him on the battlefield, and for being continuously
tormented by their image behind his sightless eyes. Better and still better. But do these