“What Would You Do?” — Simon Wiesenthal

For the readers, the context in this question is that Karl, the Nazi soldier who had slaughtered many innocent Jews, was on his deathbed seeking forgiveness from Wiesenthal, a Jew in the labor camp. Wiesenthal, a victim of Nazi hatred, did not suffer at the hands of Karl, but he felt he had to seek forgiveness from someone, a Jew, to assuage his agonizing conscience before taking his last breath. Simon Wiesenthal poses this poignant question to his readers in his memoir, “The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness,” what would they have done if a perpetrator had approached them to ask for forgiveness?

This piece is my personal response, which comes from my conviction to Wiesenthal’s questions:

Reading Wiesenthal’s firsthand account of the cruel ordeal he had to go through in the Nazi camp was a harrowing memoir. A lot of details, especially the grim reality of life’s uncertainty, the depravity of the human heart at the core, and the supposed silence of God in the midst of the indiscriminate slaughtering of His people, depict a picture of pure evil. And the intensity of the question he posed to his readers unsettles their equilibrium.

If I were Wiesenthal, I would not have done anything different from what he did in the hospital. I would have simply walked out or, at the most, lashed out at Karl. Knowing that the Scripture clearly presupposes and requires us to love our enemies and forgive them regardless of their sin, my ongoing suffering is unjustifiable. When my conscience on humanity is bleak and, most importantly, God seems distant when I bellow in agony, the prospect of forgiving an abuser of that magnitude of crime is nearly impossible for the natural disposition of the human heart. I would have stood at the crossroads of whether to forgive Karl for the crime he committed against those innocent people or try to justify my position of not forgiving the wish of a dying man. On one hand, I would have liked to see the retributive justice. On the other hand, the gospel convicts me to seek restorative justice.

Karl might have looked at me as a representative of the collective whole, but I do not represent all my people. I do not have a moral ground to represent millions of annihilated people on my own right and forgive him on behalf of the perished ones in the gas chamber and in the “pipe.” I struggle with this conundrum that I symbolically represent the entire ethnicity from whom forgiveness was sought. Then, could I assume that Karl, who sought forgiveness, also represents the whole of Nazis? Of course, NOT. It is an individual asking for forgiveness for himself after experiencing a pang of guilt. I can only forgive him for what he has done to me.

In this case, he had not harmed me. Jesus manifested what forgiveness is on the Cross. He forgave those who hung him on the cross. However, nowhere in Scripture do we find that we can forgive the abuser on behalf of the victim. I would rather suggest Karl ask forgiveness from the One who can blot out all his sins. Forgiveness is a conscious and voluntary choice. If I were to decide whether to forgive Karl on his deathbed, when violent death is routinely looming over my own head, either in the labor camp or in the gas chamber, how genuine would that forgiveness be, other than to soothe the dying man’s soul? I would even doubt my state of mind if I were capable of forgiving someone like him. Thus, I could not have stayed by his deathbed for a moment but would have walked away.