Release date: 5 October 2023 | More about the Podcast Series For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust

In this episode, we talk about Simon Wiesenthal’s sunflowers, real ones, or artificial and made from paper or any other material. In 1969, well-known Holocaust survivor and author Simon Wiesenthal wrote The Sunflower. On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. In this book, he recounted his experience with a mortally wounded Nazi soldier during World War II, and then asked prominent figures from politics, science and theology the question about what they would do under the circumstance.

The “Sunflower” in the title referred to Wiesenthal's observation of a German military cemetery, where he saw a sunflower on each grave, while he was imprisoned in the Janowska  concentration camp near Lviv and feared for his own body to end up in an unmarked mass grave.

The book touched many people, some of whom then expressed their emotions by sending sunflowers, real or crafted, to Wiesenthal’s office. 

The sunflowers are now part of the collection of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute (VWI) in Austria.

Featured guests:

Marianne Windsperger works as  a research coordinator at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI). Kinga Frojimovics is a historian and senior archivist and project leader at the VWI. Podcast host is Katharina Freise.

Marianne and Kinga will tell the story of Simon Wiesenthal, his book and the sunflowers. Listen to the episode on Buzzsprout, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or here:

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