c. 1997 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ In the television studio of the city’s most prestigious public high school, 14 high school seniors recently wrestled with an overpowering moral dilemma.

In the minds of the students gathered at Stuyvesant High School, it’s the twilight of World War II. They’ve been asked to step back in time, into the shoes of a Jewish concentration camp prisoner on work detail at a Polish hospital who comes face to face with the enemy who is on his death bed.

This severely injured Nazi SS officer had summoned the young prisoner to his room seeking forgiveness for the horrible crimes he committed against Jews.

The question posed to the students: What would you do?”The Torah teaches the one crime in Judaism never forgiven is murder, whether intended or not. There’s no way he should ever be forgiven,”said Stuyvesant High’s Amanda Mosseri.”The prayer says `forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,'”said Denton Smith, referring to the prayer spoken by Jesus and known as the Lord’s Prayer.”If God created man in his own image, then he should be able to forgive his fellow man,”said Smith, a student at Frederick Douglass Academy, a public college preparatory school in Harlem.

In fact a young man in Poland was not much older than these students when he faced this moral dilemma. The man was Simon Wiesenthal, the acclaimed Nazi hunter and author, who endured four years in concentration camps.

Wiesenthal’s wartime encounter and his resulting decision _ he kept silent in the face of the request _ would haunt him throughout life, compelling him finally to write a book about the experience and invite leading theologians to respond.

Published in 1977,”The Sunflower”(Schocken Books) has become a classic in Holocaust literature and an inspiration for interfaith dialogue.

This year, on the 20th anniversary of its release, the book has been reissued and expanded with Wiesenthal, now 89 and living in Austria, asking a new generation of thinkers how they would have responded in his situation.

The new edition includes 46 essays, including 10 from the original book, and represents a wider scope of perspectives, not only from Christian and Jewish writers, but academicians, theologians of other faiths (the Dalai Lama), human rights activists and victims of more recent atrocities, such as author Harry Wu, who survived 19 years in Chinese labor camps.”It had been a monochromatic discussion before,”said Shocken Books editorial director Arthur Samuelson.”Christians forgive and Jews say `no way.’ We wanted to have a broader theological discussion.” In an effort to keep the spirit of the book alive and engage a wider audience, Shocken is planning a series of forums around the country aimed at generating discussion among participants from different generations, and racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds.

The first roundtable for high school students was the event at Peter Stuyvesant High School, which brought together students from three schools with varying ethnic and religious backgrounds.

The moral questions debated by the group provoked nearly as many different responses as there were students, each passionate in their own beliefs: Should Simon forgive Karl, the dying SS guard, as an individual? As a representative of all Jews? Is it possible to forgive and not forget?”I think it is possible for Simon to grant forgiveness to Karl because it was an extraordinary situation,”said Stuyvesant’s Rob Elder, a Roman Catholic.”From a non-religious point of view, I was more concerned with responsibility and compassion,”responded Stuyvesant student Jai Li.”Karl’s repentance came to late for him to atone for his sins.””He offered Karl too much compassion,”said Mosseri.”He held his hand and heard his confession.” Peter Nelson, an educator with Facing History, the nonprofit group that organized the event, tried to place the historic dilemma in a contemporary context, citing current efforts to find truth and also reconciliation for past atrocities around the globe.”(What about the morality of) putting 84-year old Nazis on trial and South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission?”he asked the group.”(In South Africa) there can be no reconciliation without justice, or else the whole thing’s a farce,”said Smith, who related the events there to his own history as an African American and its legacy of slavery.

Stuyvesant’s Jeffrey Zhao, who is of Chinese descent, compared the Holocaust with the Japanese massacre at Nanking during the Chinese-Japanese war in the 1930s and expressed his disbelief that Japan had not yet formally apologized to China.

And the students reflected on their personal experience and their own capacity to forgive.

Cynthia Wells of Frederick Douglass recalled her father asking she and her siblings for forgiveness after beating their mother.”We forgave him. It eased his conscience, but I wonder if I did the right thing.”

DEA END WORDEN