The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

A persecuted Jew could only forgive wrongs done to him personally; he could not
possibly forgive genocide. I find the idea of a mock-forgiveness of a man who had helped to
burn women and children alive repellent, and I cannot see how it could be other than mockforgiveness,
granted simply because a man happened to be dying. To forgive this one SS
man would mean, by implication, to forgive every other SS man who murdered, on his
deathbed.
The SS man should have been asking forgiveness of God, and not of man. He had sinned
against the principles of humanity far more than he had sinned against a handful of doomed
human beings. This was a matter between him and his Creator, not between him and a single,
stray Jew picked out of a random working-party and forced to listen to his “confession.”
Should the Jew have told him this? It would be too much to expect of a badgered,
brutalized concentration camp inmate to play the role of a philosopher. Nor could he
possibly act as father confessor. He showed, in any case, remarkable restraint in listening to
the SS man's terrible story without expressing his horror and hatred of such bestial cruelty.
By walking out of the room without a word, he did the most sensible, the most logical,
basically the most decent thing possible.