Academic Papers

Simon Wiesenthal’s seminal narrative of his experiences as a Nazi concentration camp inmate is, at its core, an inquiry into the nature of human capacity to make decisions under conditions of extreme trauma. Conditioned by the daily assault on his physical and psychological well-being by his captors, he was unwittingly placed in a position that required him to make a decision with moral and ethical implications – grant or not grant the request for forgiveness by a dying Nazi SS soldier who had confessed to a most depraved act of inhumanity against innocent Jews. The inability to grant this request bothered Wiesenthal; and ultimately provided the principal impetus for the book he entitled The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, which also contained instructive symposia on the question of forgiveness.