Simon Wiesenthal, the Jewish Holocaust survivor
who later became the famous Nazi hunter, writes about being in a Polish
concentration camp during the Nazi regime. One afternoon he was assigned to
clean rubbish out of a hospital that Germans had improvised for wounded soldiers
carried in from the Eastern front. A nurse walked over to him, took his arm,
ordered him to come with her, and led him upstairs. They walked along a row of
stinking wounded to the bedside of a young soldier. The boy’s head was wrapped
in yellow, pus-stained bandages. He was dying. He was a 22-year-old SS trooper.
The solder, whose name was Karl, reached out and
grabbed Wiesenthal’s hand tightly. “I have to speak to a Jew,” he gasped. “I
have to confess the terrible things I’ve done so that I can be forgiven. So I
can die in peace.” His ugly story came gushing out. He was fighting near a Russian
village where a few hundred Jewish people had been rounded up. His group was ordered
to plant full cans of gasoline in a certain house. Then they marched about 200 people
into the house, crammed them in until they could hardly move. They threw grenades
through the windows to set the house on fire. The soldiers were ordered to
shoot anyone who tried to jump out of a window.
“We shot,” the soldier gasped, tears streaming
down his face. “Oh God … I shall never forget it; it haunts me every minute of
every day!”
The young man paused and then said, “I know that
what I’ve told you is terrible. I have longed to talk about it to a Jew and beg
forgiveness from him. I know that what I’m asking is almost too much, but
without your answer I cannot die in peace.”
Imagine how Wiesenthal felt at that moment. This
soldier’s ugly story didn’t simply concern unnamed, faceless strangers far
away. At least 89 of Wiesenthal’s own relatives had been killed by the Nazis.
And now he was locked in a concentration camp, doomed to die with all the
others. This soldier owed him and his people a horrendous debt. Wasn’t it time
to demand payment?
Even the best among us spend time demanding payment,
don’t we? Think about it. Doesn’t someone owe you something? An apology? A
second chance? A fresh start? An explanation? A thank you? A childhood? A
marriage?
If we were to think about it, we could all make
a list of lots of people who are in our debt. Parents should have been more
protective and nurturing. Children should have been more appreciative. Spouses
should be more sensitive. Employers should have been more attentive and
understanding. And the list goes on.
The question is, what are we going to do with
those in our debt? Here’s what Simon Wiesenthal did at the beside of that dying
and repenting Nazi soldier. “I stood up and looked in his direction, at his
folded hands, his pleading eyes. At last I made up my mind and without a word I
left the room.” So the German died without the forgiveness he so much wanted
and needed. Wiesenthal survived the concentration camp. But he couldn’t forget
that SS trooper. He wondered, troubled, for years whether he should have
forgiven the soldier. He told his story in the book Sunflower and ended it with the
haunting question for every reader. “What would you have done?” What do you do
with those who are in your debt?
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