ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the story in Simon Wiesenthal's book The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, in which a dying Nazi soldier summons a Jewish prisoner (Wiesenthal himself) to his deathbed to receive his confession of unforgivable crimes. The encounter between these two men portrayed in The Sunflower provides a context for examining the psychological relationship between forgiveness and what may be considered as the objectively unforgivable crimes of the Holocaust. In his book, Simon begins by recounting his soul-numbing experience as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. In Catholicism, confession is designated as one of the sacred sacraments, symbolizing an outer reflection of inner "grace" given by baptism. In archetypal psychology, forgiveness comes into play as an accomplice to the soul-making act of psychologizing and seeing through. The study of forgiveness in The Sunflower is a study of the failure to forgive.
