Sublime

“If you sit in darkness long enough, you get used to it. You do not realize the need for light.”

“They can condemn us to hunger but they cannot condemn us to starvation.”26

We can choose what the horror teaches us. To become bitter in our grief and fear. Hostile. Paralyzed. Or to hold on to the childlike part of us, the lively and curious part, the part that is innocent.

We’re free from the death camps, but we also must be free to—free to create, to make a life, to choose. And until we find our freedom to, we’re just spinning around in the same endless darkness.

Theresienstadt-manufactured

Who is a Jew? A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people.

my life as a writer—or my life, period—would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory.

Go into the woods to lose sight and memory of the crimes of your contemporaries. —JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

we are always under siege, and we are held there by our attempts to hold off the emptiness we intuit at the center of our lives.