The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

But that is a misunderstanding. Vengeance does not requite evil with evil; vengeance
cannot requite, repay, even out, equate, redress. If it could, vengeance on a mass murderer
would mean killing all the members of his family and a great fraction of his nation; and still
his victims would not come alive.
What we call “vengeance” is the act of bringing public justice to evil—not by repeating
the evil, not by imitating the evil, not by initiating a new evil, but by making certain never to
condone the old one; never even appearing to condone it.
“Public” justice? Yes. While the evil was going on, to turn aside from it, to avoid noticing
it, became complicity. And in the same way, after three or four decades have passed and the
evil has entered history, to turn aside from it—to forget—again becomes complicity.
Allowing the evil to slip into the collective amnesia of its own generation, or of the next
generation, is tantamount to condoning it.
You will object: “Here you are, naming vengeance as public justice because it does not
condone evil. But forgiveness too does not condone evil. It doesn't matter that it may
sometimes appear to; the fact is it doesn't. And you have already demonstrated that there are
some evils forgiveness cannot wash away. Yet now you say that vengeance, like
forgiveness, neither condones nor washes away the evil. How, then, do vengeance and
forgiveness differ?”
In this way: forgiveness is pitiless. It forgets the victim. It negates the right of the victim to
his own life. It blurs over suffering and death. It drowns the past. It cultivates sensitiveness
toward the murderer at the price of insensitiveness toward the victim.
What is always characterized as “vengeance”—which is to say, a justice that enlightens
the world as to the nature of evil (and by “nature of evil” I do not mean something