Flor del Sol

The second book on tap for me is The Sunflower. I feel that this book will be very different than Herland. First off, it is much more serious and a lot sadder than Herland. It also has a total of 53 responses or essays that give the reader another take on the novel. While reading The Sunflower, I often feel sad and sympathize for the author and protagonist, Simon Wiesenthal. The book details a Nazi soldier on his death bed, who asks a Jew for forgiveness before he passes. As a member of the Jewish faith, I thought about the possibility of this happening to me. I do not know how I would react to a person who would ask for forgiveness even though he believes that Jews are lesser people and are the root of all evil. I do not even know how Karl Seidl, the wounded Nazi soldier, mustered up the courage to ask the Jew, Simon Wiesenthal, for forgiveness. I don't even know what to compare this to; this would be like Osama Bin Laden asking an American for forgiveness for the 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon Terrorist Attacks, except worse. I could not fathom this happeneing. Although I am not overly religious, I feel that the Holocaust was one of the worst events to happen not only to the Jewish people, but for everyone who was in Germany during the 1930s and early 1940s. In my opinion there will be no genocides worse than the Holocaust. The main number that everyone hears is the six million Jews were executed in concentration camps, but there were over seventeen million total people who were killed under Adolf Hitler's regime. The Holocaust was a terrible event and it should always be remembered. The Holocaust was a terrible time, and living in one of the Ghetto Concentration Camps like Aushwitz, Birkenau, and in the case of Simon Wiesenthal the Lemberg Concentration Camp, is one of the worst fates one can imagine.
I cannot wait to read more of this book and finish it up.