Simon Wiesenthal tells the story in The Sunflower of a time when he walked away and left a young SS trooper to die unforgiven when he was in the concentration camp in Mauthausen, Austria. The soldier lay dying from head wounds and begged Wiesenthal to forgive him. But Wiesenthal walked away.

Wiesenthal was a young architect at the time, sure that he was doomed along with the other Jews caught in Hitler’s death machine. On a certain afternoon, he was given the job of cleaning out rubbish from an improvised hospital outside the camp where wounded German soldiers were trucked in from the Russian front. Getting toward evening, a nurse took him by the arm and brought him to the bedside of a boyish storm trooper named Karl, whose head was bandaged with pus-soaked bandages. He would soon die.

Karl grabbed Wiesenthal’s wrist. He whispered that he had to talk to a Jew, any Jew, before he died so that he could confess some terrible things that he had done to Jews and be forgiven for them. He confessed what he had done while he was stationed in a Russian village named Dnepropetrovsk. His company was ordered to take reprisals in the village.

They packed a frame house with Jews, including many children, poured gasoline on the floors, locked the doors, and set the house on fire. People near the windows jumped. The soldiers shot them before they landed on the ground, shot the little children right along with the parents, machine- gunned them in the air as they fell. Karl finished, appeared to be weeping, and then, when he got control of himself, he begged Wiesenthal to forgive him. He could not die in peace unless a Jew forgave him for the terrible thing he did in Dnepropetrovsk.

Wiesenthal listened, awestruck, to everything Karl told him. He said nothing. Finally he yanked his hand away and left Karl to die with his unforgivable sins unforgiven.

Afterward Wiesenthal worried that maybe he had been wrong not to forgive a young man who begged for forgiveness on his deathbed. When the war was over, and Wiesenthal had survived the Holocaust, he wrote his story. At the end of it he asked his readers, “Was my silence at the bedside of the dying Nazi right or wrong? This is a profound moral question that challenges the conscience. . . . What would you have done?”

What would you have done? If you were in Simon’s shoes, would you have offered forgiveness? Please respond in the Comments section, below.

This story is taken from The Art of Forgiving, by Lew Smedes, who has paraphrased The Sunflower, by Simon Wiesenthal. Scholars are uncertain as to the authenticity of Wiesenthal’s story.