The Drowned and the Saved is a profound exploration by Primo Levi as he attempts to understand the rationale behind the atrocities of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Bergen-Belsen. Levi dismisses the stereotyped images of brutal Nazi torturers and helpless victims, drawing extensively on his own experiences to delve into the minds and motives of oppressors and oppressed alike.

He describes the difficulty and shame of remembering, the limited forms of collaboration between inmates and SS goalers, the exploitation of useless violence, and the plight of the intellectual. Levi writes about the issue of power, mercy, and guilt, and their effects on the lives of the ordinary people who suffered so incomprehendingly.

Through his writing, Levi warns and reminds us that the unimaginable can happen again, urging us to learn from the past to make sense of the senseless.

While imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was taken one day from his work detail to the bedside of a dying member of the SS. Haunted by the crimes in which he had participated, the soldier wanted to confess to—and obtain absolution from—a Jew. Faced with the choice between compassion and justice, silence and truth, Wiesenthal said nothing.

But even years after the war had ended, he wondered: Had he done the right thing? What would you have done in his place?

In this important book, fifty-three distinguished men and women respond to Wiesenthal's questions. They are theologians, political leaders, writers, jurists, psychiatrists, human rights activists, Holocaust survivors, and victims of attempted genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, China, and Tibet. Their responses, as varied as their experiences of the world, remind us that Wiesenthal's questions are not limited to events of the past.

Often surprising, always thought-provoking, The Sunflower will challenge you to define your beliefs about justice, compassion, and responsibility.