Why Germany Needs to Put a 94-Year Old Nazi On Trial | Jewish Journal
It has been decades since Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness was published.
In 1943, one of the millions of Jews trapped in Nazis’ Holocaust kingdom is a brutalized Simon Wiesenthal. One day he was suddenly summoned to the bedside of the dying Nazi soldier Karl Seidl seeking “a Jew’s” forgiveness for destroying a house full of 300 Jews. The anguished young Wiesenthal listens, but replies only with silence. He cannot grant forgiveness for any Nazis’ crimes committed against other victims, among them his beloved mother and scores of his relatives. Nor can he forget seeing a German military cemetery—a sunflower atop each grave—and fearing his own fate in an unmarked, mass grave.
In 1943, one of the millions of Jews trapped in Nazis’ Holocaust kingdom is a brutalized Simon Wiesenthal. One day he was suddenly summoned to the bedside of the dying Nazi soldier Karl Seidl seeking “a Jew’s” forgiveness for destroying a house full of 300 Jews. The anguished young Wiesenthal listens, but replies only with silence. He cannot grant forgiveness for any Nazis’ crimes committed against other victims, among them his beloved mother and scores of his relatives. Nor can he forget seeing a German military cemetery—a sunflower atop each grave—and fearing his own fate in an unmarked, mass grave.
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