"You would have had no right to do this in the name of people who had not authorized you to do so. What people have done to you yourself, you can, if you like, forgive and forget. That is your own affair. But it would have been a terrible sin to burden your conscience with other people's sufferings."

This week, The Sunflower offered a great amount of thought and discussion. I found myself pondering over the flower placed on the SS graves, contemplating the effects of lying on ones death bed, and in the end agreeing with Josek; it is not one Jew's place to forgive for anyone but themselves.

Our military possesses a myriad of symbols and ways to mark a soldier's grave, announcing their rank, their accomplishments, etcetera. This makes sense to me. A sunflower on the grave of a Nazi did not make sense…until I decided to look up what a sunflower symbolizes. Many sites said it symbolizes paying homage to the sun, happiness….but one said that sunflowers are "a flower which blindly follows the sun; sunflowers have become a symbol of infatuation or foolish passion." So maybe this particular flower marking the graves of Nazis is not for the sheer beauty of the flower, but as a way to denote the devotion a solider had to his (or her) cause. The blind, following what promised to be the sun.

When discussing the sincerity of Karl, the deathbed-ridden Nazi, Moss and I expressed the same thought that many a times people on the brink of death will say what they feel it is necessary to say; like the reality of death scares people into confession. Say for instance, the stereotypical grumpy old man who, taking his last breaths in a hospital bed, says he's sorry to his son who he never told he loved….or something like that….In the case of Karl, he was born before the Nazi take-over, and Hitler establishing himself as "God." Perhaps, as he was brought up in the church, he resorted to what he was taught as a child, not what he accepted as a man. He wanted to live a good afterlife, and in order to do that he had to confess.

It's like death makes children of us all. Whether or not this man was sincere, I agree with Josek in that it was not Simon's place to forgive for another. Simon did not know this soldier, so what had HE to forgive him for? I think it's only right that people be allowed to speak for themselves. To make assumptions about what someone else would or would not do…that is when great conflict arises. I would imagine it hard to deny a dying man his list wish, but would it not be ever harder to live with…a false action? Had Simon granted Karl forgiveness, would HE have been forgiven by his fellow victims?

The Sunflower presents many topics of discussion. For instance that a Nazi soldier would receive a beautiful flower to mark their existence while an "undesirable" gets nothing, as if he or she had never existed at all. Also, is what someone confesses on their deathbed sincere, or more of a requirement? And was it Simon's, a solitary Jew's, place to speak words of forgiveness to a murderer, whose victims were no longer there to speak for themselves? I say, a person should only speak up for himself; spoken assumptions cause a lot of problems.