The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

4. MORAL TENDERNESS, MORAL RESPONSIBILITY
Consider this dying SS man. Is he not unlike so many others? He, at least, shows the
marks of conscience, of remorse, of sickness at his life. He is not arrogant; he is not selfjustifying;
he feels disgust at everything he has witnessed, he recoils from everything he has
committed. He is a man at a moral turning. Ought he not to be delivered over to his death—
to use the old Christian word—shriven? He is penitent, so many others are not—should the
penitent be treated like the impenitent? Should a revived goodness, a recovered cleanliness
of heart, be dealt with exactly as one would deal with the recalcitrance of an unregenerate
brute?
Consider now the brute. He exults in his brutishness. Remorse never touches him; even in
memory, even thirty years after those butcheries of his, he exults in them. His mind, dim for
other matters, is a bright and secret screen on which he renews and replenishes these
triumphs of his old lost barbaric power over the weak. He was a great man then; he was like
an angel, he served in fact the Angel of Death, lives were in his hands and under his feet, his
boots were on the necks of the doomed. As he never experienced regret then, so now he
never dreams of wishing away the old sensations and reminders.
But the dying SS man has had twinges all along. He has, in fact, a moral temperament. He
is intelligently contrite; he knows there is no way for him to atone, but he understands what
atonement is, he understands the force of contrition. He is a man with a vigorous insight into
his own moral nature. He is a man with a conscience.
Should not some special recognition—some softening of condemnation—be given to the