Hey, I had to read this for World Religions, and I figured why not record that fact here? This won't be terribly in-depth--I already wrote a response essay to it, but hey. Oh, and the reason why it's book one is because that's what Simon Wiesenthal originally wrote. Book two is an addition that's got fifty-three responses from fifty-three different people to the contents of book one... I probably won't do anything with book two, but I haven't started it yet so I guess we'll see.
So the book is based on a true experience of Simon Wiesenthal's. It occurred during the war, and he was taken prisoner. One day while he was working a nurse offered to feed him, but he would have to go with her into the hospital so she could give him food and not risk persecution. Instead of getting him food, she takes him to a dying member of the SS who had asked her to bring him a Jewish person so that he could confess his sins and ask for forgiveness before he died. Sooo yeah.
"The group to which I belonged included my old friend Arthur and a Jew named Josek, a recent arrival. These were my closest companions. Josek was sensitive and deeply religious. His faith could be hurt by the environment of the camp and by the jeers and insinuations of others, but it could never be shaken" (5). This confuses me. To shake one's faith and to hurt their faith, isn't that the same thing? To shake one's faith would be to question it... And to hurt it would to be to lay a blow unto it, right? So... Same thing? Yes? I think what Simon Wiesenthal means was that his feelings could be hurt, not his faith. Maybe.
Josek tells a prequel to the creation story: "'Our scholars say that at the Creation of man four angels stood as godparents. The angels of Mercy, Truth, Peace, and Justice. For a long time they disputed as to whether God ought to create man at all. The strongest opponent was the angel of Truth. This angered God and as a punishment He sent him into banishment on earth. But the other angels begged God to pardon him and finally he listened to them and summoned the angel of Truth back to heaven. The angel brought back a clod of earth which was soaked in his tears, tears that he had shed on being banished from heaven. And from this clod of earth the Lord God created man'" (6). Of course, he's questioned because who could believe that the Nazis as well as the Jews could come from the angel-tear clay? Josek brings up Cain. But really why I brought this up is one, it's a very interesting story. Two, the four archangels. Three, last week we had a presentation in World Religions on the Mohegan Indian tribe. In their belief system, there were four creators representing four different elements. I don't know, I just thought that parallel was kind of interesting...
"'What do you think of that, Simon?' he asked. 'God is on leave.' 'Let me sleep,' I replied. 'Tell me when He gets back'" (8).
"I once read somewhere that it is impossible to break a man's firm belief. If I ever thought that true, life in a concentration camp taught me differently. It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man, which repeatedly 'proves' that one is no longer a man. So one begins to doubt, one begins to cease to believe in a world order in which God has a definite place. One really begins to think that God is on leave. Otherwise the present state of things wouldn't be possible. God must be away. And He has no deputy" (9). / "'It is said that the Messiah will come at the end of the world.' 'But it was not the end of the world,' Grandfather said. 'It was. He just did not come.' 'Why did he not come?' 'This was the lesson we learned from everything that happened--there is no God. It took all of the hidden faces for Him to prove this to us.' 'What if it was a challenge of your faith?' I asked. 'I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.' 'What if it was not in His power?' 'I could not believe in a God that could not stop what happened.' 'What if it was man and not God that did all of this?' 'I do not believe in man, either'"--Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (Page 189)
Okay, so in books like Maus and Everything is Illuminated--books about the Holocaust--the Polish people generally tend to be depicted as cruel towards the Jews. I mean, I guess it would make sense, with all the antisemitism in the air, but that answer didn't really satisfy me. I mean, it makes sense. But Wiesenthal adds to this that the Polish people were aware that if all of the Jews were wiped out, they were next. So... they were scared and hated Jews for antisemitic reasons and out of fear, and for twisted reasons, that there wouldn't be enough Jewish people to stave off the Germans, or that it was twisted around and the belief had somehow become that the killing machine existed at all because of the Jewish people, which I suppose is technically correct, but I mean... Uh, I mean that I'm not sure how else to articulate what I mean. Oops...
What strikes me odd is something I never realized: Wiesenthal talks about all the men who killed themselves because they couldn't handle their workload or life in the camps. What I find out about this fact is that it never occurred to me that someone would try that, even though that's a pretty logical course of action and really shouldn't be a surprise that some people would do so.
The title of the book is The Sunflower because when Wiesenthal is walking through the town, he passes a soldiers' graveyard. Every soldier's grave had a sunflower planted on it. "Suddenly I envied the dead soldiers. Each had a sunflower to connect him with the living world, and butterflies to visit his grave. For me there would be no sunflower. I would be buried in a mass grave, where corpses would be piled on top of me. No sunflower would ever bring light into my darkness, and no butterflies would dance above my dreadful tomb" (15).
So Wiesenthal is taken to the dying SS soldier, a young man, hardly out of his teens. The soldier tells about his early years, originally it was thought he'd go to school for theology, but he joined the Hitler youth instead. To put it the way I understand it--and it seems sick to phrase it this way, but I don't know how else to put it--the kids were doing it. I mean, Hitler was the equivalent to a rock star. The Hitler youth was like his little fan club, seriously. And his father really stopped speaking about it, but he'd sit alone and brood for hours on end. You see, the Hitler Youth leader told the youths that they should play up the cause at home--and if anyone insulted it he said to report it. (I imagine the knowledge of this must have inspired George Orwell when he was writing about the children in 1984.) So his parents got nervous around him and never really spoke to him. And... Yeah. I think the only reason why I marked that page was to connect it with 1984, actually.
"'Shortly afterwards we moved on. On the way we were told that the massacre of the Jews was in revenge for the Russian time bombs which had cost us about thirty men. We killed three hundred Jews in exchange. Nobody asked what the murdered Jews had to do with the Russian time bombs'" (48). This frightens me. The bombs and the massacre are horrifying enough--but the fact that no-one asked about the connection... Maybe no-one even wondered about the connection at the time, only now that this dying soldier has had the chance to ruminate he's noticed the lack of logic in the conclusion drawn... I mean, it's beyond possible that no-one asked for fear of being accused of being sympathetic towards the Jews, Russians, whatever--but if that wasn't the reason for obedience... Yeah, that scares me.
"'When I was still a boy I believed with my mind and soul in God and the commandments of the Church. Then everything was easier. If I still had that faith I am sure death would not be so hard. I cannot die... without coming clean. This must be my confession. But what sort of confession is this? A letter without an answer...'" (53).
The dying man eventually, after telling Wiesenthal all the terrible things he has witnessed and done, asks Wiesenthal for his forgiveness. Wiesenthal makes no answer, he just leaves the room. (The first book ends in a challenge to the reader to consider what they might have done in Wiesenthal's shoes.) When he is back in his camp with his friends he tells them the story, and explains what the sunflowers mean to him: "Arthur joined in: 'Well, sunflowers are something to please the eye. The Germans after all are great romantics. But flowers aren't much use to those rotting under the earth. The sunflowers will rot away like them; next year there won't be a trace unless someone plants new ones. But who knows what's going to happen next year?' he added scornfully" (63).
His friends are all pretty unanimous in their decision that they would not have forgiven the man. Josek admits that he was alarmed when Simon started telling his story, he was scared that Simon had forgiven the man. Josek said he would have openly told the man he didn't forgive him instead of just walking away as Simon had done. Arthur said that he wished he could see ten such deaths a day. Anyways, Josek goes on to explain why it would have been bad for Simon to forgive the dying man: first of all, Simon suffered nothing at the dying man's hands, so he couldn't truly forgive the man, because nothing had been done personally to him that needed forgiveness. Secondly, "'I believe in Haolam Emes--in life after death, in another, better world, where we will all meet again after we are dead. How would it seem then if you had forgiven him? Would not the dead people from Dnepropetrovsk come to you and ask "Who gave you the right to forgive our murderer?"'" (65-66).
Arthur argues that the man should have called on a priest of his own religion, not a Jewish person, because the priest actually would have been able to come up with some ritual for forgiveness. Wiesenthal is a little bothered by this, because that would mean every religion's ethical stances and beliefs are different--that bothers me too. I'd hope human nature unites all people on their, well, their humane levels. Natural law and all of that...
Of course, you must also keep in mind that neither Arthur or Josek actually experienced this themselves. Who knows what their actual reactions would have been.
"It seemed to me doubtful and unreal as our whole existence in those days... it could not have been all true; it was a dream induced by hunger and despair... it was too illogical--like the whole of our lives" (67).
Two years later, Simon has moved, and has come into contact with new comrades, one of them being a priest in training named Bolek. Bolek, despite being constantly tortured in Auschwitz because his training was known to the guards, remained strong in his faith. That strength seems to mystify Wiesenthal. He talked about it extensively when speaking of Josek too, if you'll recall. I mean, I'd imagine it's not too different from Vonnegut's mystification with faith and religion. It soothes, but it can only go so far. I think that like Wiesenthal and the old woman from Everything is Illuminated I would lose faith in God, the world, man, et cetera, entirely.
Bolek goes on to say that he doesn't believe that in any of the "great" religions the question of faith differs. I agree, though I extend that to all people. Either you do or don't. You should so a grudge doesn't eat you up or hate doesn't build like a cancer in you, your conscience is clearer when you forgive (or forget), and you feel better for doing so. That's more universal in humanity though, rather than religion. It just so happens that humans created religion (or vice versa), so...
"The priests said indeed that the criminals would have to appear before the Divine Judge and that we could therefore dispense with earthly verdicts against them, which eminently suited the Nazis' book. Since they did not believe in God they were not afraid of Divine Judgment. It was only earthly justice that they feared" (85).
There are some things I didn't mention about the dying man: he died the next night or two after he spoke to Wiesenthal. He gave a bundle of his personal possessions to the nurse that had brought Wiesenthal to him and instructed her to find Wiesenthal again to give them to him. Wiesenthal refused to take the items and told the nurse to just send it to the soldier's mother. So these years later, he goes to the mother's home, he remembered the address. Wiesenthal hadn't the heart to tell her the truth of her son and kept silent. She talked about the terrible things she heard and said that the only thing she was sure of was that her son never did any wrong--not that she was saying killing Jewish people wasn't wrong, but that he didn't do that, or commit any other war crimes.
"'During his training he sent us snapshots but my husband always pushed the photos aside. He did not want to look at his son in SS uniform. Once I told him, "We have to live with Hitler, like millions of others. You know what they neighbors think of us. You will have difficulties at the factory." He only answered: "I simply can't pretend. They have even taken our son away from us." He said the same thing when Karl left us'" (91).
"Perhaps it was a mistake not to have told her the truth. Perhaps her tears might help to wash away some of the misery of the world" (94).
"There are many kinds of silence. Indeed it can be more eloquent than words, and it can be interpreted in many ways" (97).
And like I said, Wiesenthal ends his portion of his book with the challenge to the reader to try and imagine what they would have done in his shoes. I had to write an essay on it, but I'm not going to copy it all down here (unless if you really desperately want to read it). I guess I could post a link to it, since we had to make a Wordpress blog (blasphemy!) for the class... But yeah, that's not happening. To sum it up: I would not forgive him when he was asking forgiveness. I wouldn't even be able to lie and say I forgave him. I would however be able to offer comfort to him, hold his hand or what have you. The way I saw him was like Alex's grandfather in Everything is Illuminated--not a bad person, just alive in a bad time. He did what he thought was correct. (Hm... Maybe I should include the essay...)
MLA Citation Information: Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything is Illuminated. Perennial: United States of America, 2003.
Wiesenthal, Simon. The Sunflower. Shocken Books: New York, 1998.
Also, speaking some more of World Religions (and to super change the tone), Mr Stoloff is ADORABLE. (Not that he looks adorable, he actually looks like Allen Ginsberg with a less intense beard. And he's from the Bronx... And he's Jewish... This is looking awfully suspicious, Mr Stoloff...) He was talking about my essay on The Sunflower to the class--I mentioned Everything is Illuminated in that too (the bit about Alex's grandfather)--and he was like "I love it when you talk about nongenerational books you've read and movies you've seen!" and I was all d'aww, you're making me blush, Mr Stoloff! Then he was like, "I saw the movie of that... the one with the hobbit." (Elijah Wood plays Jonathan.) But yeah, he seems like a pretty cool so far.
Aaaand no cryptic song lyrics for this post, for obvious reasons. Also, spellchecker's acting weird again. Sorry.
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