Sublime

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.

The first Jew feared he would be the last. The eternal people almost dies out in its first generation.

During the first two decades of Israel’s existence, few literary works sought to actualize the human experiences of the Holocaust by transmuting them into a poetic discourse that would make them emotionally and intellectually accessible.

Most people thought that we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.

For centuries, people believed that saying Kaddish would shorten the amount of time the deceased spent in Gehenna (hell) before ascending to Gan Eden (heaven).

Kaddish became part of the folk religion of the Jews.

Where was God at Auschwitz? Sooner or later this was the question I had to ask, because the Holocaust still casts its shadow over Jewish life.

I knew he must have saved from his breakfast ration. It was far more than the small piece of bread which moved me to tears at that time. It was the human “something” which this man also gave to me—the word and look which accompanied the gift.

After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.