Synopses & Reviews
An expanded and revised edition -- including thirty-three new respondents -- of Simon Wiesenthal's famous gathering of essays that consider the question: Can evil be forgiven?
As a prisoner in Mauthausen, Wiesenthal was brought before a dying Nazi soldier who asked for his forgiveness. Years later he met the soldier's mother, who asked him how he knew her son. Both times, deciding between silence and truth, compassion and justice, he said nothing. But had he done the right thing? What would you have done in his place?
These are the questions Wiesenthal posed to leading intellectuals fifteen years after the Holocaust. Now, twenty years later, he asks it of a new generation of thinkers. The contributors to this volume include Robert Coles, the Dalai Lama, Matthew Fox, Harold S. Kushner, Primo Levi, Cynthia Ozick, Dennis Prager, Dith Pran, Albert Speer, and Harry Wu; their responses are as varied as are their experiences of the world. The result is a powerful, often surprising examination of an issue at once religious, political, moral, and personal -- and as central to our lives today as it was fifty years ago.