I've just had a week's holiday, and holidays always involve a stack of (mostly trashy) books. After the latest highly enjoyable but pretty brainless Dan Brown novel, I started on 'The Storyteller' by Jodi Picoult. It's about the Holocaust, so it's pretty grim, and includes a long narrative from the point of view of the heroine's Jewish grandmother, a survivor of Auschwitz. It was the ending of the novel, set in the present day, which really shocked me, however - SPOILER ALERT - if you want to read this novel, look away now.
The novel's present day heroine, Sage, befriends Josef, a retired German teacher in his 90s. Josef is a a much-loved local character who has served his community well and has many friends. Knowing that Sage is from a Jewish family, Josef tells her his terrible secret - during the war, he was a member of the SS who served in Auschwitz. He does not feel that he deserves the long life he has had and wants Sage to help him die.
In the end (and it's a very long book), after much agonising, Sage decides that she will help him die, and bakes him a bread roll containing poison. Josef gratefully eats the bread, sinks to the floor in convulsions, and as he is dying Sage leans over and says, loudly and clearly, 'Josef, I will never, ever forgive you.'
This man had taken part in the worst, most barbaric and contemptible episode in human history, when an entire people group was systematically persecuted, imprisoned and then either killed or worked to death. There is no possible way of defending the actions of those who participated in the Holocaust - they were acts of profound evil. The point is also made in the book that it is not possible for someone to forgive a sin which was not done to them. How can Sage forgive a crime in place of the victim?
There has to be the possibility that someone can forgive, however. For Sage to withhold forgiveness as she watches another human being die seems to me to be profoundly barbaric in itself. She is denying Josef's humanity in the same way he denied the humanity of the Jewish people he killed. And she is hardly a shining example of moral rectitude herself, having spent much of the book in a relationship with a married man. Josef's sins are many, but she has also sinned. At what point does someone become irredeemable? How many sins must we commit before we move out of the reach of God's mercy?
But perhaps I am being unfair on Sage. After all, she is an atheist, and all she has to offer is human forgiveness. Perhaps that is too much to ask of anyone. When I forgive those who have wronged me, I offer them the forgiveness of God, because I know I have already received God's mercy.
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