Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

“Young Girl Reading” Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

By Simon Wiesenthal

Last week, we shared a few of the invited comments on an incident recollected in Wiesenthal’s memoir. Wiesenthal is a prisoner in a succession of concentration camps. He is called to the hospital to witness a dying SS man’s regret. The man’s remorse had this particular focus: he’d participated in forcing a large group of Jews of all ages and conditions into a building that his SS unit then set on fire. Rather than pronounce some formula of absolution, Wiesenthal had listened to the confession in silence and left in silence.

In The Sunflower, about his concentration camp experience, Wiesenthal asked ten thoughtful individuals to comment on the incident. Since the comments (with an additional thirty-two in this edition) were revealing, I shared some last week and will now share a few others.

Here is Erich H. Loewy, M.D., author and Alumni Chair of Bioethics at the University of California at Davis. He points out a feature I hadn’t noticed. Although the positions of the two men appear reversed, with Wiesenthal now the stronger one and the SS man about to lose his life, the reality is still that “at any moment the SS man, although in one sense weakened, can call upon overwhelming forces which could and would crush Wiesenthal.”

What this means is that anything the Jewish prisoner says can still be held against him. Let’s face it. Death might free us from the burdens of human existence but life in a death camp does not. A man whose body fails him while his conscience torments him is not someone to rely on. 

But wait a minute! Don’t we want closure – at least in our ex post facto understanding? Isn’t that asymmetry morally unsatisfying? 

Yes. 

Manes Sperber studied psychology in Vienna with Alfred Adler and wrote literary works in French and German. He brings up another facet of the situation: there is, he says, a bond between victimizer and victim. What sort of bond does he have in mind? Clearly they are linked historically. They would be linked in any courtroom case. But Sperber seems to visualize a psychological link. And here is how he imagines it playing out ideally: “But if that young man had lived and remained true to the convictions that tortured the last hours of his life, and maybe even transfigured him—if he were still among us would Wiesenthal condemn him? I think not.”

Sperber’s counterfactuals may be useful in the setting of a psychotherapist’s office. However, they are not morally useful. The terms for that kind of assessment were set in the context of what wasn’t done and didn’t happen.

What about the psychological aspects, as Sperber sees them? For myself, I don’t see it the way he does. There are people who harmed me, with whom I feel no bond and whom I never think of. Why is that? Because the harm was identified in full and fully thwarted. My present unconcern with those harm doers obtains even if their harm lasted many years and its antidote took effect much more briefly. So far as I am concerned, that situation is cured. By contrast, harms still uncured continue to trouble me, even if their effect was more trivial and briefer. 

So, if I consult my own experience, I must reject Sperber’s effort to replace the moral order with psychology. A moral harm can’t be erased that way.

Eva Fleischner is an author, a Professor Emerita of Religion and is involved in high-level offices dealing with Catholic-Jewish relations. She notes details of Wiesenthal’s behavior with the dying man that reveal compassion and refinement of spirit. She also notes that both traditions, Catholic and Jewish, highlight God’s forgiveness of the truly repentant sinner. What she brings out, overlooked by some Christian commenters, is that Jesus’ call to turn the other cheek refers to “wrong done to me… . Nowhere does he tell us to forgive wrong done to another.”

In the circumstance where Wiesenthal was implicitly asked to do just that, to forgive wrong done to many others, he could not in conscience have done so, and – in the light of his ongoing suffering and peril – the dying SS man was humanly oblivious to ask it of him.

If Eva Fleischner is right about the scope of Christian forgiveness, then the two faiths are not so different after all.

“Young Girl Reading” Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

By Simon Wiesenthal

The author was a young Jewish prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, in conditions of near starvation, slated for death by heavy labor. Other, mostly Jewish prisoners had been separated from the work details at the outset and immediately murdered.

One day, an unusual incident interrupted the ghastly routine. A nurse appeared, ordering Wiesenthal out of the line of workers and leading him to the bedside of a dying SS man. The dying man wanted to confess to a Jew one atrocity that weighed on his conscience. His unit had forced a large number of Jews, young and old, into a building to which the SS then set fire, killing them all. Among those who perished, he especially remembered a father and his very young son.

If the dying man expected Wiesenthal to express forgiveness, his wish must have been frustrated. Our author heard him out reluctantly, kept silent and left the room as soon as the man finished his confession. Once back in the camp, Wiesenthal shared the same scene with his emaciated, doomed friends. When, having by chance survived the war, he wrote this memoir, he invited thoughtful comments from ten contributors. 

In my previous week’s column, “The Color of the Sky,” I volunteered my own comments on the deathbed confession scene. Now, I’ll share some of the invited comments reproduced in the 1997 Schocken edition. In all, the book has 42 comments, 10 from the 1969 (in English 1970) original edition and 32 from this expanded second edition. Since most of the assembled comments are of the greatest interest, the three I describe here have been picked out nearly at random. 

First, we hear from Primo Levi, a notable writer and Auschwitz survivor. Wiesenthal’s tale unfolded, Levi comments, “in an atmosphere impregnated with crime.” All questions of right and wrong were obscured in the concentration camp, deeply and deliberately. In that context above all, Levi is emphatic in his conviction that Wiesenthal did right to refrain from bestowing any verbal absolution. It would have given the illusion of salvation to the dying SS man but burdened Wiesenthal with “an empty formula and consequently a lie.” Like other Jewish contributors, Primo Levi doesn’t miss the fact that Wiesenthal is being used to stand in for all Jews, thus replicating in another guise the Jew of Nazi propaganda: “an abnormal being – half-devil, half-miracle worker, capable in any case of supernatural deeds.” For Levi, what’s at risk in this deathbed test is truth. As he sees it, Wiesenthal has passed the test.

Next we hear from Cynthia Ozick, award-wining novelist, essayist and writer of short stories. Her central point concerns pity. Here I quote it in full. “Every idol is a shadow of [Biblical idol] Moloch, demanding human flesh to feed on. The deeper the devotion to the idol, the more pitiless in tossing it its meal will be the devotee. The Commandment against idols is above all a Commandment against victimization, and in behalf of pity.” The quick forgiver, in haste to wash the murderer clean, has washed away the victim. By contrast, the person who steadily seeks the Law’s just retribution keeps the victims constantly in view and gives them back their forgotten faces. Some might reproach Cynthia Ozick for her refusal to accept a dying murderer’s remorse, but to me she seems rather tender.

Our last comment comes from award-winning writer Harry Wu, a witness of an entirely different kind. Wu spent nineteen years in one of China’s prison labor camps, sent there for “rightist tendencies.” In plain words, he committed the crime of voicing his personal opinion in the midst of a group indoctrination session. What stands out in Hu’s account of brutal imprisonment is that no one who enforced that punishment ever took the slightest personal responsibility for it. Not even later, after his condemnation had been retroactively lifted! The Party Line giveth and the Party Line taketh away.

So we learn that there’s one thing even worse – more erasing of the human face – than evil. 

Even worse

is pretending that 

evil does not exist.