For me there would be no sunflower. I would be buried in a mass grave where corpses would be piled on top of me. No sunflower would ever bring light into my darkness, and no butterflies would dance above my dreadful tomb.
Simon becomes preoccupied with the sunflower when he is being taken past a cemetery on his way to the military hospital. He is fascinated that the Nazis gave this small act of remembrance and this is juxtaposed in his mind with the way in which he will be buried, in a mass grave. This shows him that the soldiers have more inherent value in the eyes of the Germans than the prisoners do. Even in death they are flaunting their superiority to him. Even Karl will get a sunflower. Each Nazi will be remembered and each of their families will have a place to come and visit to mourn them. The prisoners will be soon forgotten because their families die alongside them; their names will not be marked anywhere. This is something that Simon seeks to counteract in writing the book.
"Look," he said, "those Jews died quickly, they did not suffer as I do - though they were not as guilty as I am."
These words speak volumes about Karl. He is completely self-centered even on his death bed. As he is confessing his crime, there is still part of him that believes he is more of a victim than the Jews he murdered, and he is still seeking to minimize the magnitude of his crimes. Karl is a man in denial, which is why it is so important to him that he is forgiven.
The words also show Karl's correlation between suffering and guilt. He seems to believe in a system of karmic retribution, he is suffering monstrously because he has committed a monstrous crime. It is also illuminating in that it shows the Nazis believed that the Jews, Poles and other groups they tried to exterminate were inherently guilty and this is why they were made to suffer.
I asked myself if it was only the Nazis who had persecuted us. Was it not just as wicked for people to look on quietly and without protest at human beings enduring such shocking humiliation? But in their eyes were we human beings at all?
This is one of the key ethical questions that Simon raises in the book. He acknowledges that not all Germans were Nazis, something which Karl's mother also highlights when he visits with her. She was, in fact, opposed to both the Nazis and to her son becoming part of their number. She distances herself from them, also distancing herself from the responsibility of what they have done.
Simon believes the entire nation is culpable if they did nothing to help. There were Germans who did try to help, some by hiding Jewish families so that they would not be discovered by the Nazis, some by helping them to escape to safety. However, his argument is that by doing nothing, they bear some responsibility for the atrocities that took place.
Simon also believes the prisoners were seen as less than human; they were looked upon as the doomed anyway, so why would ordinary Germans put themselves and their families in jeopardy for people who were going to be killed anyway? There was a sort of fatalism about the way in which they were viewed; they were being worked to their death, and so there was no point in trying to help them.
