The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

murderer or a careerist killer. He had asked for a Jew, any Jew, to come to his bedside so
that he could make his peace with his victims, and with God.
Wiesenthal said nothing, and he was right. The crimes in which this SS man had taken part
are beyond forgiveness by man, and even by God, for God Himself is among the accused.
When He proposed (according to the account in the Book of Genesis) to destroy Sodom
and Gomorrah because they were sinful, Abraham protested: “Would God destroy the
righteous together with the wicked?” In the story in Genesis, God agreed that if there were
as many as ten righteous people in these sinful cities, he would spare them, but Abraham
could not find even this small number. But, in this dialogue with Abraham, the Judge of all
the earth did agree that He, too, must act justly; he accepted the premise that he has no right
to destroy the just. In our time, we must ask Abraham's question: among the victims, there
were many righteous and holy people, and more than a million children who had not known
sin. On the evidence of the “debate” in Genesis, Abraham could not have forgiven God for
willing, or allowing, such cruelty. God can perhaps be defended by the answer that He gave
to Job: the Divine plan is beyond human understanding. I cannot swallow the further
extension of this argument, that the Nazis were instruments devised by God to help Him
realize his unknowable design. Surely, it is not beyond His power to achieve whatever He
wants in the world without the near total murder of a people. Can anyone dare forgive the
Nazis, and their helpers, in the name of the hidden and silent God who stood by the
Holocaust? No doubt, as the Catholic he had once been, the SS soldier thought that words of
contrition would get him Divine absolution. Perhaps, after Wiesenthal left, he confessed to a
priest and was given the last rites and assured of Divine forgiveness. But the God who had
allowed the Holocaust did not, and does not, have the standing to forgive the monsters who