Forgiveness In Simon Wiesenthal's 'The Sunflower'

Forgiveness has been an important human action throughout history, allowing two or more people to move on from a wrongdoing. After someone has been wronged, forgiveness is the act of releasing the negative feelings one harbors towards the offender. When Simon Wiesenthal, author of The Sunflower, was in a concentration camp during World War II, a Nazi on his deathbed had Wiesenthal brought into his hospital room to act as his confessor. The Nazi, Karl, told Wiesenthal of the atrocities he committed against the Jews and asks for his forgiveness. Weisenthal decided to withhold forgiveness, but he asked many other people what they would do in that same situation. Many people agreed with him, but one replier, Desmond Tutu, determined that he would …show more content…
Desmond Tutu, in responding to Wiesenthal's question, said that he definitely would have forgiven Karl. His reasoning for this comes from his experience with apartheid in South Africa. During that time, many people in South Africa were tortured, abducted, and/or killed because of the extreme racial tensions. Nelson Mandela, the president of South Africa at the time Tutu wrote his response, had been imprisoned for twenty-seven years because he spoke out against apartheid. Mandela, along with many of the loved ones of the people who were abused and killed, decided to forgive the people that hurt them. The act of forgiveness here was a step towards reconciling the divided factions in South Africa and help the nation move on from its violent past. According to Tutu, “Without forgiveness, there is no future” (Tutu 2). In addition to providing emotional healing, forgiveness has shown to promote better physical health. According to the Forgiveness and Health article, an experiment was carried out that measured people’s blood pressure and heart rate as they relate an event that offended them. The readings nearly invariably went up as the subjects told the researcher about the event. However, regardless of the degree of the offense, some people’s blood pressure and heart rate went down after some time, while other people’s remained elevated. The reason some people’s readings went down were because they had forgiven whoever had wronged them, while the people whose readings remained high had not forgiven the wrongdoer. Since high blood pressure and heart rate have been linked to serious cardiovascular problems, forgiveness can lead to better