Moral or ethical dilemmas face us all pretty well every day of our lives; some are wrestled with; others blithely ignored. Some are easy; some not so easy.
During the Second World War, Simon Wiesenthal, a Jewish prisoner in the German camps was confronted with an ethical problem, difficult enough to last a life time of thought and wrangling for anyone let alone a Jewish prisoner in Nazi Germany.
Just be glad you haven’t had such an encounter.
While on a work detail outside the camp, Simon was approached by a nurse from a nearby hospital.
“Follow me,” she said. As a prisoner he couldn’t really refuse.
She led him to a room and stood guard outside to prevent any intrusion. Simon went in and saw a German soldier covered in bandages, so effectively, he was barely visible. He was close to death. His voice was a croak; speaking required great effort on the part of the dying soldier.
“I want to talk about an experience which is torturing me, otherwise I cannot die in peace.”
Having been brought up as a Catholic, he had voluntarily joined the Hitler Youth and then the SS, much to the dismay of his father.
While on active duty in Ukraine (part of the Russian offensive), he had taken part in an atrocity in which hundreds of Jewish men, women and children had been herded in to a house, the doors locked and hand grenades thrown in. Some tried to escape by jumping from windows.
They were shot.
One picture of a man, woman and small child jumping from a window and being shot imprinted itself on the soldier’s memory – indelibly.
Here was the soldier in hospital, waiting to die. He had asked the nurse to find a Jew – any Jew.
He wanted to ask forgiveness for the awful crime in which he had participated.
Now you can see them – an SS soldier at death’s door and a Jewish prisoner in Germany with little hope of surviving the camps.
What better than to receive forgiveness from a Jew against whose fellow Jews the heinous crime had been committed?
Simon Wiesenthal listened patiently to the halting voice.
“At last,” he writes, “I made up my mind and, without a word, left the room.”
In Simon’s place, what would you have done?
He tells the story in his book ‘The Sunflower: on the possibilities and limits of forgiveness’
He leaves us with the question.