The Sunflower

The class will read and discuss Simon Wiesenthal’s book The Sunflower, about the limits of forgiveness. There are many editions, each with different thinkers speaking about forgiveness. We will examine those thinkers to see if we agree:

While imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was taken one day from his work detail to the bedside of a dying member of the SS. Haunted by the crimes in which he had participated, the soldier wanted to confess to—and obtain absolution from—a Jew. Faced with the choice between compassion and justice, silence and truth, Wiesenthal said nothing. But even years after the war had ended, he wondered: Had he done the right thing? What would you have done in his place?

In this book, 53 distinguished men and women respond to Wiesenthal’s questions—theologians, political leaders, writers, jurists, psychiatrists, human rights activists, Holocaust survivors, and victims of attempted genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, China, and Tibet. Their responses, as differing as their experience, remind us that Wiesenthal’s questions are not limited to events of the past.

The Sunflower: On Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness is a paperback available on Amazon.