The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

had carried out the murders.
On the other hand, when Simon Wiesenthal visited the dead soldier's mother in Stuttgart
some months later, he was right not to deprive her of her illusions about her son. He did not
visit his sins on her. Wiesenthal obeyed the biblical injunction that each of us dies for his
own sins, and not even for those of our children or of our parents. He could not tell this
mother the truth, for the truth would have destroyed her, even if she had continued to live on
as a physical being.
These reflections were not elicited from me only by contemplating the moving story that
Wiesenthal has told. I was born in Lubaczów, Galicia, in 1921 and escaped the Holocaust
because my family was in the United States by 1926. I cannot make peace with my own
generation of Germans and their collaborators in the satellite countries, because my
contemporaries could have refused to join the Nazis, but the majority hailed Hitler to the day
of his defeat and death. I remember my own relatives—a grandfather, many uncles and aunts
and their children—and I cannot fathom the mentality of those who murdered them for being
Jews. Those who say that they are sorry and ashamed, I can only leave to their own guilt. I
am just as pained by the attempts to “explain” the Holocaust. These writings may,
sometimes, be full of historical insights, or even ingenious theology, but together they
obscure and cover over a question that can never be answered: Why did man, and God, fail
so horribly? Together with Simon Wiesenthal, who said nothing at the deathbed of the SS
soldier, we can only be silent.