Book Review: The Sunflower

Al Stone-Gebhardt | November 1, 2023


A Nazi lays dying on a bed in a makeshift hospital before you. He confesses his participation in brutally slaughtering a town full of Jews — and asks you for forgiveness. Do you forgive him?

We often seek answers to life’s most difficult questions: To be or not to be? What happens after we die? Does God exist? But none pose such a unique ethical dilemma as the question posed in The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal.

This recount by a holocaust survivor asks us: What is the human limit of forgiveness? What crimes are forgivable, and what makes them so? 

And the answers to such questions are up to you, the reader.

Wiesenthal meticulously crafts the scene from within the Lemberg concentration camp near Lviv, Ukraine. He is a number; he is enslaved. And he is being marched to a makeshift hospital to do grueling work. 

While passing a German military cemetery on his march to the hospital, Wiesenthal sees a row of sunflowers. 

Paying homage to the German military, citizens placed sunflowers on the graves of fallen soldiers. Wiesenthal notes the meticulous state of the graveyard. He reflects that, as cheap, undesirable labor – part of a quota of Jews in a Nazi encampment – he will die in an unmarked mass grave. Simon Wiesenthal will not receive a sunflower or a devotee to sweep his grave. 

At the hospital, a nurse calls Wiesenthal away from his detail to the bedside of a dying Nazi soldier. 

The man identifies himself as Karl and informs Wiesenthal that he is seeking “a Jew” to absolve him of his guilt. 

Karl then takes Wiesenthal through his experience as a young man raised in the Third Reich. Something he did one year ago haunts him.

It is then that Simon Wiesenthal learns that Karl took part in the horrific burning of an entire village of Jewish people; he rounded 300 civilians into a house and set it on fire. He gunned down those who attempted to jump out of the windows.

After finishing his account, Karl asks Wiesenthal for forgiveness. Yet, Wiesenthal does something that would inevitably follow him for the remainder of his life: Rather than answer the dying Nazi, he simply walks away. 

The soldier dies the following day. Wiesenthal cannot take back his refusal to respond — to castigate or absolve the Nazi. Peace eludes him. Now, he feels he is the guilty one — and thus begets the philosophical question that this story revolves around. Should he have forgiven the Nazi?

In the second half of The Sunflower, people ruminate on the question, offering several conclusions. Responses vary from the Dalai Lama to priests and rabbis, from a Cardinal to a Vietnam veteran to Desmond Tutu and even a high-ranking Nazi present at the Nuremberg Trials.

To me, this is one of the pivotal moments of the book. Each respondent analyzes their role as one who remembers — or one who has witnessed or experienced atrocities, such as survivors of the Bosnian Genocide — and decides for themselves whether the Nazi deserves forgiveness. Each presents differently on the nature of accountability. 

Some seek to contextualize what situations may lead to withholding forgiveness, what forgiveness means and whether Wiesenthal was obligated to forgive.

As I read this book, multiple questions arose in my mind. 

Does the fact that Karl neglected even to learn Wiesenthal’s name ("Never mind, you are a Jew and that's enough,") negate his claims of remorse? Is participation in a pogrom that murdered 6 million people even forgivable? Can one person forgive on behalf of the whole? And should Karl have even asked for forgiveness without properly atoning? 

In the Nuremberg Trials, the perpetrators — such as high-ranking SS officers — often express no compunction for their crimes. The question is relevant to the victims of the Shoah, however, as it forces them to consider the humanity of the perpetrators. Are these men capable of feeling guilty for their crimes?

Moreover, Wiesenthal highlights that though the Nazis were diverse, they behaved in the same way. Not every soldier is the same, but all, of their own volition, participated in a mass genocide. How? Why? 

I found that responses from survivors of the Holocaust balked at forgiving the architects of the Shoah– because, after all, does forgiving not also imply forgetting? I felt dismayed. I felt disturbed and upset; as just one man, I do not have the answer. 

For the ponderers and those who think they have the right answer, this book is for you.

The Sunflower is arguably the most challenging pageturner you will ever read; it has both the best and the worst of humanity in its pages. It puts the reader in the judge’s seat. Overall, it is a poignant and powerful memoir.

 So, do you forgive the dying Nazi?

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