The Sunflower

“‘Josek,’ he said, ‘I am prepared to believe that God created a Jew out of this tear-soaked clod of earth, but do you expect me to believe He also made our camp commandant, Wilhaus, out of the same material?’” 

This statement is spoken by Simon’s friend, Arthur, in response to a story Josek tells about God creating man from a clod of earth soaked with the tears of an angel who had been banished from heaven. Arthur interrupts the story to argue that the Jewish people and the Nazis cannot possibly all be created in the same way. The question of whether Nazis and Jews are of the same order of humanity becomes one of the central questions running through Wiesenthal’s account. 

“So that’s the news; we live in a world that God has abandoned?” 

Simon says this to his friends after they have heard a woman state that the reason things are so bad for Jewish people is that God is on leave. Wiesenthal goes on to say that, during this time, he witnessed many people lose their faith in God. Under the circumstances where people were treated as sub-human, over a period of time, people begin to think that God has forsaken them. He says that, during this time, he felt the woman’s words to be true. 

“Did any of them reflect that there were still Jews and as long as they were there, as long as the Nazis were still busy with the Jews, they would leave the citizens alone?”

Wiesenthal is describing the experience of being a part of a work detail, parading to the worksite outside the concentration camp through the streets of the town where he once lived.