EHRI

Release date: 5 October 2023 | More about the Podcast Series For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust

In this episode, we talk about Simon Wiesenthal’s sunflowers, real ones, or artificial and made from paper or any other material. In 1969, well-known Holocaust survivor and author Simon Wiesenthal wrote The Sunflower. On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. In this book, he recounted his experience with a mortally wounded Nazi soldier during World War II, and then asked prominent figures from politics, science and theology the question about what they would do under the circumstance.

The “Sunflower” in the title referred to Wiesenthal’s observation of a German military cemetery, where he saw a sunflower on each grave, while he was imprisoned in the Janowska  concentration camp near Lviv and feared for his own body to end up in an unmarked mass grave.

The book touched many people, some of whom then expressed their emotions by sending sunflowers, real or crafted, to Wiesenthal’s office.

The sunflowers are now part of the collection of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) in Austria.

 

Featured guests:

Marianne Windsperger works as  a research coordinator at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI). Kinga Frojimovics is a historian and senior archivist and project leader at the VWI. Podcast host is Katharina Freise.

Marianne and Kinga will tell the story of Simon Wiesenthal, his book and the sunflowers. Listen to the episode on Buzzsprout, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or here.

 

More on this episode

I called the book Sunflower. Because on every military cemetery in the Eastern countries and every German military cemetery and the place of a cross, they give a sunflower and I remember when we walked to this place, for me was the sunflower, like a periscope, to bring light into the darkness of the grave, and I  know, we expect a mass grave… but all this, in the time when he was talking, I saw the sunflower, I think, he is a murderer he will have the sunflower, and I… I will have nothing.
– Simon Wiesenthal in a radio interview for Chicago based WFMT radio, March 12, 1976

In 1976, Simon Wiesenthal gave a radio interview in the US in which he talked about, among other things, his book The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. Simon Wiesenthal originally wrote “The Sunflower” in German, however, he also worked on parallel language editions of the book. In 1969, the French edition was published, followed by the German and English editions. Simon Wiesenthal had by then become a well-known Holocaust survivor, writer and “nazi-hunter” (a not uncontroversial title). The book inspired many readers to send all kinds of sunflowers to the author. These objects have been saved and are now stored in the archive of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute in Austria as part of their Wiesenthal collection.

To some the sunflower has become a symbol for the Holocaust. The sunflower that is planted on a grave is a symbol of remembrance for the person buried and an act of bearing witness to a single life. Wiesenthal’s book, The Sunflower, is also a gesture of bearing witness to the many people who died nameless in mass graves.

Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal was born in 1908 in Buchach, which was then part of Austria-Hungary and now of Ukraine. He had studied architecture and was in Lviv with his wife Cyla when the war broke out. As Jews, they were forced to live in the ghetto and then to Janowska concentration camp. Wiesenthal and his wife both managed to survive the Holocaust under horrible circumstances. Immediately after the war, Wiesenthal started to collect information on both victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust. He worked for the War Crimes Section of the United States Army, and in 1947 he opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Austria. He said:

“When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it.”

For decades, Wiesenthal pressured Western governments to locate and prosecute escaped Nazi offenders and also offered leads that sometimes led to their extradition.

He also published several books, articles and memoirs, among which The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs (1967) and The Sunflower (1969). Wiesenthal’s tenacity and unflagging passion for tracking down perpetrators inspired survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides to believe that justice can and will prevail, even with the passage of time. He died in September 2005 in Vienna, aged 96.

The Sunflower. On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

In the first half of the book The Sunflower, Wiesenthal recounts a tragic event that happened to him while in the concentration camp near Lviv. In 1943, a group of forced labourers, including Wiesenthal, are sent to a converted army hospital to clear medical waste. Simon Wiesenthal is summoned from this work by a nurse to the bedside of a dying Nazi soldier. The soldier tells him he is seeking “a Jew’s” forgiveness for a crime that he has committed one year prior. Over a number of hours, the soldier tells Wiesenthal his life story and then confesses to having participated in the destruction, by fire and armaments, of a house with three hundred Jews inside. He states that as the Jews tried to leap out of windows to escape the burning building, he and the other soldiers gunned them down.

After the soldier finishes this story, he asks Wiesenthal to forgive him. Wiesenthal then leaves the room without saying anything. The next day, the nurse informs Wiesenthal that the soldier has died.

In the second half of the book, Wiesenthal poses the ethical dilemma of whether or not he should have forgiven the nazi-soldier to the reader, and then to a group of well-known people, as diverse as the Dalai Lama, Deborah Lipstadt, Desmond Tutu and Albert Speer, who give their responses in the various language editions.