Journal 5 "The SUnflower": Travis Hearn

At the end of Wiesenthal's The Sunflower, he asks if he should have forgiven the Nazi soldier who, nearing the end of his life, sought to be absolved from the sins he had committed against his own Christian faith, and the God he and Wiesenthal shared. By approaching a victim of his crimes, he recognized that he had done awful things, and the only one with the power to release him from guilt was the one who he had lorded power over.

There are several themes at play here, such as the notion of evil, the power switch mentioned above, the summation of a genocide to just a single soldier and a single victim. All of these play roles in deciding whether forgiveness is correct, both at the time and in retrospect, from various angles.

Simply put, the answer is yes, Simon should have forgiven Karl. At that point, with Karl dying and no one around to judge him, if Simon had forgiven him then he could have lived what little time he had left in better spirits. Even if Simon could only say the words, could not feel the emotions of forgiveness, that would be enough for the soldier. And, put honestly, Simon should not have been able to feel the emotions. It was not his duty or privilege to speak for his entire people, he did not have the authority to grant to this soldier or to the entire Nazi party, true forgiveness. But, he could have eased a dying man's last day. Similarly, Karl was wrong for seeking out a single person to tell his story to, thinking that a single Jew's forgiveness was the forgiveness of their race. Instead, he should have written down his story, his sincere request, and tried to get it to the living relatives of the family he had burned. If you hit someone in the street, you don't go to the person who sits next to them in church/synagogue/mosque and ask forgiveness. You ask it from their family. So, yes, Karl was foolish in his request, but Simon was hateful, and between the two hateful is much worse. Yes, Karl was a cog in a grand machine of genocide against Simon's people, but he was also a human, and if a single word, one single "yes" to Karl's "Do you forgive me?" would lift the weight of his deeds, then why not give it? In William and Ellen Craft's story, there is a quote from a preacher who says he would not utter a single prayer, even if it would free every single slave, and the response to that was that it was hateful and lazy and weak. Granted, in this case the reward is not a race's freedom from shackles of iron, but a man's freedom from the shackles of self-loathing, but the refusal to take the slightest motion to do so just makes Simon petty.