Sublime

“Et lux in tenebris lucet”—and the light shineth in the darkness.

WHEN I WOKE UP, it was daylight. That is when I remembered that I had a father. During the alert, I had followed the mob, not taking care of him. I knew he was running out of strength, close to death, and yet I had abandoned him. I went to look for him. Yet at the same time a thought crept into my mind: If only I didn’t find him! If only I were rel

A major factor in the colossal moral failures which made the Shoah possible was the nonresponse of the bystanders.

man may enter a harbor and reclaim his dignity.

ON APRIL 10, there were still some twenty thousand prisoners in the camp, among them a few hundred children. It was decided to evacuate all of us at once. By evening. Afterward, they would blow up the camp. And so we were herded onto the huge Appelplatz, in ranks of five, waiting for the gate to open. Suddenly, the sirens began to scream. Alert. We

to be a Jew is to cry out, even when silence would be safer, easier, and more convenient.

On December 17, 1942, the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, declares in Westminster that Nazi Germany is exterminating European Jewry.

used to ask, Why me? Why did I survive? I have learned to ask a different question: Why not me? Standing on a stage surrounded by the next generation of freedom fighters, I could see in my conscious awareness something that is often elusive, often invisible: that to run away from the past or to fight against our present pain is to imprison ourselve

There are words for this too, a Hebrew phrase for 2,500 years’ worth of people murdered for being Jews: kiddush hashem, death in sanctification of God’s name.