My essay

Here's my essay (no one's commented yet, but sarah wants to read it so here you go!). Please let me know what I could do to make it better. Any sort of critiqueing is desired, good or bad. Thanks.

Possibilities and Limits

Nearly sixty years have passed since the closing of World War II, a war that caused much death and pain for humanity. Simon Wiesenthal, a survivor of the Holocaust and the German concentration camps, writes in his book The Sunflower about one if his experiences during World War II, and asks the reader to respond to his question of what the reader might have done in his place. The experience that Mr. Wiesenthal writes about involves a dying SS man named Karl who asks Mr. Wiesenthal for forgiveness for the crimes that he has committed against the Jewish people of Europe as a member of the Nazi Party as he is on his deathbed. The question posed to the reader by Simon Wiesenthal is not a simple question. It delves deep into ones morals and beliefs that are at the core of our very soul.

It is difficult to place oneself into Simon Wiesenthal’s position since many people alive today were not alive during World War II, let alone standing at the deathbed of a SS man as a Jew from a concentration camp. A situation that I find to be one of possible comparison would be to be placed at the deathbed of my Uncle and he were asking for forgiveness from me for what he has done to me and my family since the passing of my father on December 10, 1998.

Some time after that day my Uncle, whom had been in a family farm partnership with my father since the early 1970’s when they inherited the farm from their parents, and my mother were to start dissolving the family partnership since there were no more cattle left in the partnership. There had been a complete herd dispersal at the beginning of the preceding November since the health of my father had been failing since early July when he had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor that was supposed to take his life within 6 months. Over the course of the next 5 years, my Mother and Uncle would have many different court dates set and re-scheduled, mediation attempts, and downright horrible legal squabbles. To save time, my Uncle not only tried to cheat us out of land that my father had work tirelessly for, but tried to force us out of the state/region and cost my family enough money to put my and my brother through college 2 times each, or approximately over $100,000. We now do not even acknowledge his presence when we are with 10 feet of him in public unless we absolutely have to.

Agreeing with Hans Habe, “The two unspoken questions…interest me specifically: Whom we ought to forgive, when we ought to forgive.” But that is not the only questions being ask of the reader either. The reader is also being asked to answer if we ought to forget as well.

Whom we ought to forgive is not easily answered, as reiterated in many of the responses in The Sunflower. Can we forgive those that have not committed crimes against us, but against many other people? I believe that people cannot do so. Only the God, or Gods if you will, that you believe in have the power to give judgment and justice. This of course assumes that you believe in beings with a higher power than our own. With this in mind, Simon Wiesenthal did the right thing by leaving the dying SS agent Karl on his deathbed without an answer. Karl may have had the right intentions by attempting to seek atonement and repent for his crimes, but by asking for “any Jew” is not the appropriate way to do this. Karl, by asking for any man of Jewish blood, still was going along with the Germans classification of Jews: mass identity, mass murder. For me and my situation, I would have left the room such as Simon did, if not directly said no to my Uncle because he was driven by something that I feel is one the greatest evils on earth known as greed.

The question of when we ought to forgive is more easily answerable than whom. To be able to be forgiven by who has been wronged, the crime needs to be atoned for and justice needs to be handed out. This justice can either be handed down by man and his laws or by the God and his high court in heaven. Over time, the German people have been slowly forgiven for their crimes against the Jewish people during World War II. This forgiveness is rightly deserved as the new generations of Germans had not caused the crimes. They are only the descendants of the guilty party. Simon Wiesenthal does not have forgiveness for the Nazi Germans who committed those crimes against his friends and family of the Jewish faith, and maybe rightfully so. The time that it takes for Simon to forgive may be longer than he has to live. As for me, I do not believe that I will anytime soon forgive my Uncle for what he has done to the family. Maybe as Susannah Heschel put it, “Perhaps the issue is not forgiveness, but rather how the victims and their descendants can live without bitterness and vengeance, without losing their own humanity.”

The last question of if we ought to forget is another question that pulls at our soul. Obviously there is the old phrase. “Bury the hatchet,” or, “Forgive and forget.” However there are some things that either can not or should not be forgotten. The Holocaust is one of those. Some of the responders to The Sunflower try to discuss this issue in there own responses, but the bottom line is that something as big as the Holocaust should not be forgotten because of what we can learn from it and hopefully by never forgetting it, something like that will never happen ever again. Obviously Simon Wiesenthal will never forget what happened to him in the German concentration camps of World War II, just as I will not forget what has happened in my family over the past six years for a long time.

So to answer Simon Wiesenthal’s question of what I would do if placed in his circumstances directly: The exact same thing. Some crimes can not be forgiven or forgotten.



Heart Otto