Type 4 Nora FCAs Summary Character Opinion Forgiveness “Is it possible to forgive and not forget? How can victims come to peace with their past, and hold on to their own humanity and morals in the process?” In The Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal writes about an incident that occurs when he is imprisoned in a concentration camp. One day, when he is working in a hospital, he gets summoned to the room of a dying SS member. His head wrapped in bandages his body so thin his bones stick out, he reaches for Simon's hand and says, “I am resigned to dying soon, but before that I want to talk about an experience which is torturing me. Otherwise I cannot die in peace.” The member of the SS, tortured by his murderous crimes, seeks forgiveness from a Jew, any Jew. “I cannot die...without coming clean. This must be my confession.” Simon stays silent inching farther and farther away from the …show more content…
Simon first notices the sunflowers scattered across a military cemetery when he is on his way to his work duty. “each grave there was planted a sunflower, as straight as a soldier on a parade.” Simon sees the sunflowers on the graves as a connection “to the living world...” a place for “...butterflies to visit his grave.” Simon begins to feel envious of the dead soldiers, he writes “For me there would be no sunflower. I would be buried in a mass grave, where corpses would be piled on top of me. No sunflower would ever bring light into my darkness, and no butterflies would dance above my dreadful tomb.” Simon also encounters the sunflower when he is talking to the dying SS man when she notices a sunflower in the window “already making its appearance...It would accompany him to his cemetary, stand on his grave, and sustain his connection with life.” when Simon, the victim, would have nothing. The sunflower represented, even in death, the injustice between Germans and