Exploring the power of forgiveness

In his book, “The Sunflower,” Nazi death camp survivor Simon Wiesenthal described the moral dilemma he faced at the bedside of a dying SS trooper.

Agonized by the crimes he committed – including the murder of a family with a small child, the Nazi wanted forgiveness from a Jew.

So Wiesenthal, a young man imprisoned in a concentration camp, was summoned from his labor brigade.

The dying man grabbed his hand, confessed his crimes and begged for atonement. But Wiesenthal couldn’t speak. He left the room in silence.

“What would you have done?” Wiesenthal asked in “The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness.”

John Roth, an internationally recognized scholar in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies, will pose that question next week during lectures at Whitworth College and Washington State University. While delving into the subject of ethics during and after the Holocaust, Roth will explore the conditions for forgiveness – a topic that’s widely discussed not only in religious circles, but also in research and popular culture.

“This is not something that has an obvious answer,” Roth said during a phone interview. “We all know that forgiveness could be a good thing, an important thing that’s needed much of the time, but whether it’s something that should always or can always be given by people who are asked to forgive is an issue. …

“There’s a question of whether forgiveness is always the right thing to do.”

The question of forgiveness is a “hot-button issue” that arouses strong emotions among Holocaust survivors, said Roth, who will move to Winthrop, Wash., next month after 40 years of teaching at Claremont McKenna College in California, where he founded the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights.

While some believe forgiveness is necessary for healing, others say the crimes committed during the Holocaust are beyond atonement and that the act of forgiving could lead some to forget the horrors that took place.

Roth brought up the idea of “cheap grace,” a major concern of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran theologian who was executed for participating in the Nazi resistance movement. Bonhoeffer believed that forgiveness sometimes comes too easily, Roth pointed out – that if given too generously, forgiveness could actually contribute to injustice.

The Holocaust expert also highlighted more recent events in which the issue of forgiveness has played a central role, including South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which assembled after the end of apartheid, and during the hearings in the aftermath of Rwanda’s civil war.

“The request for forgiveness has to be accompanied by contrition and atonement,” said Roth, who added that he doesn’t have a “one-size-fits-all” answer on the conditions for forgiveness. “It has to include the effort to make amends in some way.”

Forgiveness, incidentally, is not an obligation, he stressed. It is a “free gift” that the person who has been wronged can offer.

Roth – co-author and editor of more than 40 books including “After-Words: Post-Holocaust Struggles with Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Justice” – became deeply involved in the field of Holocaust studies after reading the writings of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

“…That was really a formative influence, a life-changing influence on me,” Roth said during a December 2006 interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “… As I read about what had happened to him and contrasted that with the good fortune and the life I was having in the Untied States as a young professional, there was a kind of collision that emerged in my life, and I felt that I needed to find out more about the Holocaust and its history.”

Reflecting on Wiesenthal’s question, Roth said he thinks that silence was the appropriate response.

“The silence had a kind of integrity about it that was sincere,” said Roth. “He didn’t disrespect the request that he heard, but he didn’t fully honor it, either.”

Forgiveness remains one of those topics that continue to vex people, he said, because the right thing to do isn’t always clear. “There is a tension between the value of forgiveness and the difficult of granting it,” Roth said.