The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

even saw one, and whatever atrocities did happen, took place during what is known as the
“Hitler Era”—or in the “time of the Nazis”—which is the greatest collective alibi ever
conceived.
Small wonder then that the world should so quickly forget crimes (which nobody ever
saw) committed by external criminals (whom nobody ever knew)?
To forget all may be easy, but to forgive all must be something more than a pulpit
platitude. First, we must ask ourselves in whose hands lies the privilege of granting
forgiveness? We can, of course, say, with the ecclesiastics, that mercy and forgiveness
belong entirely to God, in which case the whole dialogue comes abruptly to an end. Or we
can subscribe to the dictum of the poet Dryden—“Forgiveness, to the injured doth belong.”
But, unfortunately, the injured in this case (six million martyred dead) are incapable of
exercising such prerogative or indeed of expressing any opinion at all.
And if the dead can't forgive, neither can the living. How can you possibly forgive
monsters who burned people alive in public; in ceremonies, staged in the open, with typical
Teutonic pomp and precision? Could we even expect the Almighty to exonerate them? But it
is precisely a hideous crime like this that is central to the challenging question posed in The
Sunflower—was Wiesenthal right in refusing to forgive the dying Nazi? You can ignore the
question, or evade it, or hedge it about with casuistic hair-splitting, but the simple issue
remains—what would you have done in Wiesenthal's shoes? There is no generic answer; it
is an individual dilemma that demands a personal answer.
I, for one, would have had no hesitation in solving the problem. I figure it this way:
Wiesenthal himself was about to die—ignominiously and forgotten—as a direct result of all
those “ideals” and those “standards” which the dying Nazi and millions like him were proud