The Sunflower

The Sunflower

Author: Simon Wiesenthal

Publisher: Schocken

Published: 2008-12-18

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0307560422

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A Holocaust survivor's surprising and thought-provoking study of forgiveness, justice, compassion, and human responsibility, featuring contributions from the Dalai Lama, Harry Wu, Cynthia Ozick, Primo Levi, and more. You are a prisoner in a concentration camp. A dying Nazi soldier asks for your forgiveness. What would you do? While imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was taken one day from his work detail to the bedside of a dying member of the SS. Haunted by the crimes in which he had participated, the soldier wanted to confess to--and obtain absolution from--a Jew. Faced with the choice between compassion and justice, silence and truth, Wiesenthal said nothing. But even years after the way had ended, he wondered: Had he done the right thing? What would you have done in his place? In this important book, fifty-three distinguished men and women respond to Wiesenthal's questions. They are theologians, political leaders, writers, jurists, psychiatrists, human rights activists, Holocaust survivors, and victims of attempted genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, China and Tibet. Their responses, as varied as their experiences of the world, remind us that Wiesenthal's questions are not limited to events of the past.


Summary of The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal

Summary of The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal

Author: QuickRead

Publisher: QuickRead.com

Published:

Total Pages: 18

ISBN-13:

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Come along on a Holocaust survivor’s quest to answer the questions surrounding the forgiveness of a Nazi soldier. Imagine that while experiencing the atrocities of living in a concentration camp, you become confronted with a dying Nazi soldier’s request for forgiveness. Could you forgive a person who played a role in the systematic killing of millions of innocent people? While holding his hand and listening to confessions of the crimes against your own people, many others outside are suffering from starvation, working to death, and being led into gas chambers. Simon Wiesenthal experienced such a scenario during his time at a concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, and he has since been plagued with the question: to forgive or not to forgive? Of course, he has lived with the decision that he made at that moment, but his experience has inspired him to seek answers from others. By speaking with more than 50 people from different walks of life, ranging from religious leaders to fellow genocide survivors, Wiesenthal seeks to answer if he made the right decision. As you read, learn about a dying Nazi’s search for repentance, how Wiesenthal reacts when face-to-face with a murderer, and lastly, why practicers of Judaism believe murderers cannot be forgiven. Do you want more free books like this? Download our app for free at https://www.QuickRead.com/App and get access to hundreds of free book and audiobook summaries. DISCLAIMER: This book summary is meant as a preview and not a replacement for the original work. If you like this summary please consider purchasing the original book to get the full experience as the original author intended it to be. If you are the original author of any book on QuickRead and want us to remove it, please contact us at [email protected].


Study Guide: the Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal (SuperSummary)

Study Guide: the Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal (SuperSummary)

Author: SuperSummary

Publisher:

Published: 2019-03-03

Total Pages: 61

ISBN-13: 9781798607411

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SuperSummary, a modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, offers high-quality study guides for challenging works of literature. This 61-page guide for "The Sunflower" by Simon Wiesenthal includes detailed chapter summaries and analysis covering 54 chapters, as well as several more in-depth sections of expert-written literary analysis. Featured content includes commentary on major characters, 25 important quotes, essay topics, and key themes like Forgiveness and Repentance (Teshuvah).


Defying Hitler

Defying Hitler

Author: Sebastian Haffner

Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press

Published: 2019-07-29

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13:

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Defying Hitler was written in 1939 and focuses on the year 1933, when, as Hitler assumed power, its author was a 25-year-old German law student, in training to join the German courts as a junior administrator. His book tries to answer two questions people have been asking since the end of World War II: “How were the Nazis possible?” and “Why did no one stop them?” Sebastian Haffner’s vivid first-person account, written in real time and only much later discovered by his son, makes the rise of the Nazis psychologically comprehensible. “An astonishing memoir... [a] masterpiece.” — Gabriel Schoenfeld, The New York Times Book Review “A short, stabbing, brilliant book... It is important, first, as evidence of what one intelligent German knew in the 1930s about the unspeakable nature of Nazism, at a time when the overwhelming majority of his countrymen claim to have know nothing at all. And, second, for its rare capacity to reawaken anger about those who made the Nazis possible.” — Max Hastings, The Sunday Telegraph “Defying Hitler communicates one of the most profound and absolute feelings of exile that any writer has gotten between covers.” — Charles Taylor, Salon “Sebastian Haffner was Germany’s political conscience, but it is only now that we can read how he experienced the Nazi terror himself — that is a memoir of frightening relevance today.” — Heinrich Jaenicke, Stern “The prophetic insights of a fairly young man... help us understand the plight, as Haffner refers to it, of the non-Nazi German.” — The Denver Post “Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler is a most brilliant and imaginative book — one of the most important books we have ever published.” — Lord Weidenfeld


Forgiveness

Forgiveness

Author: Mark Sakamoto

Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1443417998

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#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER When the Second World War broke out, Ralph MacLean chose to escape his troubled life on the Magdalen Islands in eastern Canada and volunteer to serve his country overseas. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Mitsue Sakamoto saw her family and her stable community torn apart after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Like many young Canadian soldiers, Ralph was captured by the Japanese army. He would spend the war in prison camps, enduring pestilence, beatings and starvation, as well as a journey by hell ship to Japan to perform slave labour, while around him his friends and countrymen perished. Back in Canada, Mitsue and her family were expelled from their home by the government and forced to spend years eking out an existence in rural Alberta, working other people's land for a dollar a day. By the end of the war, Ralph emerged broken but a survivor. Mitsue, worn down by years of back-breaking labour, had to start all over again in Medicine Hat, Alberta. A generation later, at a high school dance, Ralph's daughter and Mitsue's son fell in love. Although the war toyed with Ralph's and Mitsue's lives and threatened to erase their humanity, these two brave individuals somehow surmounted enormous transgressions and learned to forgive. Without this forgiveness, their grandson Mark Sakamoto would never have come to be.


No Future Without Forgiveness

No Future Without Forgiveness

Author: Desmond Tutu

Publisher: Image

Published: 2009-02-04

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0307566285

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The establishment of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a pioneering international event. Never had any country sought to move forward from despotism to democracy both by exposing the atrocities committed in the past and achieving reconciliation with its former oppressors. At the center of this unprecedented attempt at healing a nation has been Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whom President Nelson Mandela named as Chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. With the final report of the Commission just published, Archbishop Tutu offers his reflections on the profound wisdom he has gained by helping usher South Africa through this painful experience. In No Future Without Forgiveness, Tutu argues that true reconciliation cannot be achieved by denying the past. But nor is it easy to reconcile when a nation "looks the beast in the eye." Rather than repeat platitudes about forgiveness, he presents a bold spirituality that recognizes the horrors people can inflict upon one another, and yet retains a sense of idealism about reconciliation. With a clarity of pitch born out of decades of experience, Tutu shows readers how to move forward with honesty and compassion to build a newer and more humane world.


It Happened in Italy

It Happened in Italy

Author: Elizabeth Bettina

Publisher: Thomas Nelson Inc

Published: 2011-01-04

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1595553215

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One woman's discovery-and the incredible, unexpected journey it takes her on-of how her grandparent's small village of Campagna, Italy, helped save Jews during the Holocaust. Take a journey with Elizabeth Bettina as she discovers-much to her surprise-that her grandparent's small village, nestled in the heart of southern Italy, housed an internment camp for Jews during the Holocaust, and that it was far from the only one. Follow her discovery of survivors and their stories of gratitude to Italy and its people. Explore the little known details of how members of the Catholic church assisted and helped shelter Jews in Italy during World War II.


American Masculine

American Masculine

Author: Shann Ray

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2011-06-21

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 155597032X

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Winner of the 2010 Bakeless Prize for Fiction, a muscular debut that reconfigures the American West The American West has long been a place where myth and legend have flourished. Where men stood tall and lived rough. But that West is no more. In its place Shann Ray finds washedup basketball players, businessmen hiding addictions, and women fighting the inexplicable violence that wells up in these men. A son struggles to accept his father's apologies after surviving a childhood of beatings. Two men seek empty basketball hoops on a snowy night, hoping to relive past glory. A bull rider skips town and rides herd on an unruly mob of passengers as he searches for a thief on a train threading through Montana's Rocky Mountains. In these stories, Ray grapples with the terrible hurt we inflict on those we love, and finds that reconciliation, if far off, is at least possible. The debut of a writer who is out to redefine the contours of the American West, American Masculine is a deeply felt and fiercely written ode to the country we left behind.


The Holocaust

The Holocaust

Author: Doris Bergen

Publisher: The History Press

Published: 2016-08-04

Total Pages: 489

ISBN-13: 0752469398

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This complete history incorporates the 'voices' of the Holocaust, not only the perspectives of the victims, but also the perpetrators and bystanders. Bergen reveals the common misunderstanding that the Holocaust was aimed solely at Jews. In actual fact the Holocaust claimed the lives of 12 million people and incorporated many different social and ethnic groups. The Nazi program of destruction not only focused on Jews, but the disabled, Gypsies, Poles, Soviet POWs, homosexual men, Afro-Germans and Jehovah's Witnesses. The Second World War enabled this carnage by conquering territories and people, turning soldiers and doctors into trained killers, and creating a veneer of legitimacy around vicious acts of 'ethnic cleansing' and genocide. Bergen's pathbreaking study uses cutting-edge and original research to reveal how these attacks were linked in a terrifying web of violence and brings to light the real extent of the most notorious and far reaching campaign of genocide in modern history.


The Nazi Holocaust

The Nazi Holocaust

Author: Ronnie S. Landau

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-02-12

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 085772858X

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The Nazi Holocaust is one of the most momentous events in human history. Yet, it remains on many levels a baffling and unfathomable mystery. By shunning simplistic 'explanations' Ronnie Landau has set out, in a clear, thought-provoking and enlightened fashion, to mediate betweeen this vast, often unapproachable subject and the reader who wrestles with its meaning. Locating the Holocaust within a number of different contexts - Jewish history, German history, genocide in the modern age, the larger story of human bigotry and the triumph of ideology over conscience - Landau penetrates to the very heart of its moral and historical significance. Deeply concerned lest the Holocaust, as a 'unique' phenomenon, be cordoned off from the rest of human history and ghettoized within the highly charged realm of 'Jewish experience', he is at pains to show that transmitting understanding of the Holocaust is about connecting with all humanity.Intended both for the general reader and for students and academics (especially in history, psychology, literature and the humanities), this work is an important breakthrough in the struggle to perpetuate the memory of a tragedy which the world is all too ready to forget.