The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness Study Guide

Simon Wiesenthal was born in 1908 in Buchach, Galicia, a town that was then part of Austria-Hungary and is located in modern day Ukraine. His father died in combat in World War I, and his younger brother died at a young age. Wiesenthal attended the Czech Technical University in Prague to study architecture, graduating in 1932. He married his wife Cyla in 1936 when he returned to Lwów, Galicia (Wiesenthal uses the German name of Lemberg). Lemberg was annexed by the Soviets in September 1939 with the partition of Poland. By November 1941, the Lemberg Ghetto had been set up using the forced labor of Jews, and Simon and his wife were forced out of their homes and into the Ghetto. During the war, Simon was separated from his wife and was processed through five different concentration camps, ending up in Mauthausen. Mauthausen was liberated by the Americans on May 5, 1945, and Simon and his wife were reunited in late 1945. Wiesenthal then began to work to gather information for future war crimes trials, founding the Jewish Documentation Center in Linz in 1947 for this purpose. Wiesenthal’s work led to the capture and trial of many Nazi officials, though most of the people whose names he gathered were never tried. He spent most of the latter part of his life doing this work, until his death in September 2005.

The Sunflower details an episode that occurred during the Holocaust—the Nazi's plot to exterminate the Jews of Europe, largely by annexing Jews all over Europe to ghettos and then sending them to concentration camps. At these camps, millions of people were worked to death, starved, or murdered. By the end of World War II, Adolf Hitler had systematically murdered six million Jews and millions of gypsies, Communists, homosexuals, and other people the Nazis considered undesirable. In Poland in particular, prior to World War II, there were about 3.5 million Jews living in the country. Following the German annexation of Poland, Jews were forced into ghettos, stripped of their property and possessions, and forced to do slave labor for the war efforts. Eventually, they were deported to concentration camps. It is estimated that about 90% of Jews in Poland were murdered, leaving only about 350,000 survivors.

Simon wrote a few other autobiographies chronicling his time during the Holocaust and afterward, including The Murderers Among Us and I Hunted Eichmann. Other prominent accounts of the Holocaust include Elie Wiesel’s Night, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (Levi also writes one of the responses in The Sunflower).