The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

HUBERT G. LOCKE
Silence hangs like a pall over this wrenching experience that you have shared with us,
Mr. Wiesenthal. When the dying Nazi turns to you and tries to beg forgiveness, you remain
silent. At that moment, you tell us, “there was an uncanny silence in the room.” Later, when
you visit his mother, you stand before his portrait in silence and finally you leave the old
woman without having answered her entreaties. By remaining silent, you kept the truth about
a son from his mother—in your words “without diminishing…the poor woman's last
surviving consolation—faith in the goodness of her son.” You gave, on one hand, silent
assent to a dying man's truth about himself and, on the other, you kept the truth, by silence,
about a son from his mother. In your silence, both revelation and concealment are manifest;
is it possible that you said more in your silence than if you had spoken?
You ask if your silence to the dying Nazi's pleas for forgiveness was right or wrong. You
wonder if it was a mistake not to have told his mother the truth. You also ask those of us who
read your account, if we had been in your place, what we would have done. Only those who
are certain of their answer to your final query can have the arrogance to pose answers to the
first two. Silence, in fact, may be the better response—our silence to yours—in the hope that
by listening quietly and more closely to your experience, we might learn from it, rather than
moralize about it.
Why is it, in fact, that we mortals are so averse to silence, that we feel we must greet each
experience with dissection, discussion, and analysis, that to speak is to know? There is, to