Political Economist

The Case of Andre Stein

Andre Stein is a professor of Human Communications at the University of Toronto. He is also practicing psychotherapy for Holocaust survivors. According to his own explanation, he survived the Holocaust when he was a young child. (255) Due to this personal experience, he might be invited to respond to Simon’s Dilemma.

Stein begins his essay with quotation of some sentences from The Sunflower. According to him, Simon’s silence as a response to Karl’s request for forgiveness was inevitable, choice-less choice considering the situations of the concentration camp Simon had to face.

With this introduction, he starts to deal with various important moral, religious and sociological issues raised by Simon’s story. They are all about Karl’s role in this story, the necessary condition for true repentance, the meaning of Simon’s two silences (one to Karl and the other to Karl’s mother) and the possibility of collective guilt or German’s collective responsibility of massacre of the Jew.

Firstly, there is an issue of Karl’s attitude. With respect to this question, Stein argues that Karl does not have any right to ask for forgiveness from a Jew in the first place. Karl, the dying SS man, could have followed his own religious faith and moral values of his family. However, it was the young SS murderer himself who volunteered the military personnel, and joined in collective massacre of the Jews. In this respect, Karl’s “moral pains” are not so greater than those of Simon and other Jewish prisoners, or are not pains at all. (251)

Furthermore, Stein argues that Karl does not show any truly repentant attitude toward Jewish people. Rather, the dying SS man had the nurse to bring him a Jew – “any Jew” – so that he could confess and receive the Jew’s forgiveness in order to die in peace in his own way. According to Stein, this kind of request is not only absurdity itself but also shows the fact that the dying SS man still think of the Jew as an object, or instrument of his own salvation, not as an individual subject or fellow human being. (252) In other words, Karl did not change his prejudice against the Jew even before his death, and this attitude cannot be understood as true repentance.

For this reason, those who blame Simon for his not forgiving Karl can only be understood that they have a greater affinity with the dying murderer than with his victims. Furthermore, those who grant forgiveness to the SS man show that they do not know about Nazism at all. In other words, only those who do not have the same experience as Simon and his colleagues did, namely only those who do not understand fully their situations can either blame Simon or argue that Karl deserves to be forgiven. (251)

Second question is about Simon’s silence. How can we understand and judge Simon’s silence in front of Karl’s death? As we already know, Simon kept silent while listening to the dying SS man’s confession and request for forgiveness. To Stein, Simon’s attitude was charitable enough to the dying SS man because he had listened to the young murderer’s confession not by “his own ears but also by ears belonged to the dead and other dying Jewish people such as Eli and his mother and his comrades” at the situation; Simon could have told Karl, “I heard what you did, how you feel about it. I can see how scared you are of dying with a burdened conscience. And this is all that I can do. I am not telling you how much I hate you, for the flames of my hatred would burn me before they would reach you. I cannot forgive you not only because I have no right to speak for your victims but also because you have forced me to listen to your story. For me this is another curse.” According to Stein, not saying these words, keeping silence was sufficient charity that Simon could show toward Karl. (253)

In addition, Simon did not treat the dying SS murderer as a monster. Instead, he respected the last humanity of a human who had lost his humanity; He listened to Karl’s confession quietly. He even flied away the fly from Karl’s head. Even though listening to Karl’s murderous misdeeds was another mental torture to Simon, he did neither condemn Karl nor get away from the chamber. To stein, this attitude was the most honorable deed that Simon, a Jewish concentration camp prisoner, could show toward the murderer. Thus, Stein argues that Simon should not be troubled anymore by those who blame him for not granting forgiveness to Karl. (253)

The final argument that Stein addresses is about Simon’s another silence in front of Karl’s mother and German’s collective responsibility of the crimes. Stein argues that Simon should have told the truth to Karl’s mother. To Stein, “Simon had a responsibility toward past and future victims to tell her the truth. And Karl’s mother had the responsibility of rising above her personal pain and telling the world what her son had done.” “Karl’s mother should have taken some of the burden of a guilty collective conscience. We must not forget that millions were murdered by a nation of good sons. Thus everyone who holds on to a pristine moral image of his or her children is a collaborator in their crime.” In this respect, Stein argues that “Karl’s parents are not guilt-free in his joining the SS. And by keeping the truth under cover, Simon enabled Karl’s mother to live a nasty lie.”(255)