Forgiveness In The Sunflower

Forgive, not because they deserve forgives, but because you deserve peace. It’s not easy to stop blaming someone’s fault, especially for someone who do wrong to us. In the book The Sunflower written by Simon Wiesenthal, a survivor of the Holocaust during World War II, he described his conflict with Karl, a dying Nazi soldier who killed many innocent Jews and begging for forgiveness for his outrageous crime at the end of his life. At the end of this sad and tragic episode, Simon did not response to Karl’s request directly; instead he left us a tough question: “What should you have done?” Based on what Karl had done during World War II and his repentance, each person might have their own point of view about where should we draw the line of forgiveness.
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According to Jewish religion, fully repentance was really important for them to determine whether a person deserve forgiveness. As Wiesenthal’s friend Bolek mentioned in the book “In our religion repentance is the most element in seeking forgiveness” (Wiesenthal 83)”. From this quote we could conclude that any person who was deeply repentance was eligible to ask for forgiveness. Therefore, firstly we should decide whether Karl was truly sorry about the mistake he has made. It was important to note that if he was not truly regret about his fault, he would not find someone who might hate him so much according to his identity as a Nazi soldier to confess his sin when he was dying. If he did not feel sorry about what he did, found someone to confess his sin was absolutely unnecessary. According to The sunflower, there were some specific examples to show Karl’s repentance. For example, he said “I cannot die ... Without coming clean” (Wiesenthal 53). It indicates that Karl really sought for redemption before his final breathe. Simon became his last chance to make everything back into right track and requested a peaceful death. Another instance demonstrated Karl’s repentance was that he remembered he shot the family to death when they jumping out from the window of the burning house. That image remained in his mind and tortured him mentally until his very last second of life. Just like he described in book, “The pains in my body are terrible, but worse still is my conscious, It never ceases to remind me of the burning house and the family that jumped from the window” (Wiesenthal 53). This scene engraved in his mind deeply since he felt guilty toward the family which broke him down mentally and making him unable to move, led to his injury. If he did not truly regret to his fault, this scene would not remain in