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The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness , by Simon Wiesenthal, with a symposium edited by Harry James Cargas and Bonny V. Fetterman. Revised and expanded edition (Schocken, 271 pp.; $24, hardcover, $TK, paper). Reviewed by L. Gregory Jones, dean of the Divinity School at Duke University and author of Embodying Forgiveness (Eerdmans).

The story is gripping, moving, yet harrowing: a dying Nazi confesses his complicity in mass murder to a Jew imprisoned in a concentration camp, and even asks the Jew for forgiveness. How should the Jew respond? How could he be expected to respond?

This might make for an ingenious piece of fiction; alas, it is a true story that happened to none other than Simon Wiesenthal, the remarkable man most noted for his work tracking down Nazi war criminals. He is also noted for The Sunflower, his account of an encounter in 1944 with Karl, a Nazi, and Karl's deathbed confession.

The Sunflower begins with Wiesenthal, an educated Jew, as an inmate in a concentration camp in Poland. He is part of a work detail that is sent from the camp to do cleanup work in a makeshift hospital for wounded German soldiers, a building that had once been the school that Wiesenthal attended. Along the way, Wiesenthal notices a cemetery for deceased Germans; he notices that each grave has a sunflower on it. For Wiesenthal, the sunflower signifies many contrasts between the fate of the Nazi dead on the one hand, and his anticipated fate and those of Jews like him on the other: individual graves, decorated with sunflowers, versus mass graves, unmarked and unmarkable. Continual connections to the living world versus a loss of all such connection.

Upon arriving at the hospital, Wiesenthal is ordered by a nurse—indeed, a nun—to follow her into the building. He is taken down the hallways, and then brought into a room where he encounters a dying Nazi, a 21-year-old ss man named Karl. Karl's body is wrapped in bandages, covering even his eyes and head, and he is barely able to speak. Yet before he dies he wants to confess a crime that has been "torturing" his memory, and more specifically, he wants to confess to a Jew. He wants to confess his shame at having become a Nazi.

Even more, he wants to confess a particular episode in which he killed a family trying to flee a building, crammed with hundreds of Jews, to which the Nazis had set fire. He cannot get that family's faces out of his mind; he covers his blinded eyes as he retells the episode to Wiesenthal. He received his mortal wounds, he tells Wiesenthal, in a later battle in which he could not bring himself to shoot another group of Jews. As the faces of the family he had killed earlier filled his consciousness, a shell exploded by his side, causing his blindness and, eventually, his death.

As Wiesenthal listens to Karl's story, he is simultaneously attracted to the authenticity of the confession and repelled by the horrifying tale Karl is telling. Wiesenthal's thoughts continually return to those sunflowers, signifying the different worlds of dying Nazis and Jews. As Karl confesses, Wiesennthal does not leave, but neither does he speak. Wiesennthal has no doubts that Karl's confession reflects "true repentance"; Karl indicates that he wants to die "in peace," and that he has "longed to talk about [his crime] to a Jew and beg forgiveness from him." Wiesennthal is moved by Karl's repentance, yet he concludes that the contrast between the dying Nazi and the doomed Jew is too great; "between them there seemed to rest a sunflower. At last I made up my mind and without a word I left the room."

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October 26 1998, Vol. 42, No. 12