New EHRI Podcast: A Sunflower for Simon Wiesenthal
The first episode of the second season of the EHRI Podcast "For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust“ has just launched. This episode is called "A Sunflower for Simon". Katharina Freise talks to VWI's Marianne Windsperger and Kinga Frojimovics about Simon Wiesenthal’s sunflowers, real ones, or artificial and made from paper or any other material. In 1969, 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.
Listen to the episode on Buzzsprout, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or on the webpage: https://www.ehri-project.eu/podcast-episode-sunflower-simon.
