Sublime

Before the war Zus could have never dreamt of marrying Sonia Boldo. Educated, beautiful, and rich, she belonged to a world beyond his reach. War and the forest narrowed the social gap that separated them. As one of the leaders, Zus gave Sonia prestige and protection. She, in turn, offered him an upper-class illusion.

‘I will never agree,’ he shouted, as if he were addressing an open-air meeting, ‘to the existence of two kinds of law for German nationals. There is an immense amount of unemployment in Germany, and I have, for instance, to turn away youths of pure German stock from higher education. There are not enough posts for the pure-bred Germans, and the Jew

For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

My friend Ruth Zylberman sent me these two short letters from an eight-year-old boy to his grandmother during the 1936 purges in the Soviet Union. The first: Dear Babushka, I’m not dead yet. You’re the only one I have in the world and I’m the only one you have. If I don’t die, when I’m grown up and you’re very, very old, I’ll work and take care of

actual Trauma and the fetishization of Trauma. It is the identification of traumatized people with bullies, who cannot be opposed or acknowledge mistakes. The Jews have an opportunity to deprogram themselves, as some of us have chosen to do when faced with the Palestinian challenge. We change our self-perception, our myths about ourselves. We chall

Resist The Siren Song

Mordechai Berkowitz, a blacksmith, established a workshop

Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.