I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.
But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused.
All this under a magnificent blue sky.
Once we begin to regard the well-being of others as integral to our own, we overcome the paralysis of competing rights, which rationalizes innocent suffering.
You see, Doctor, what people say is true: man carries his fiercest enemy within himself. Hell isn’t others. It’s ourselves.
The main theme remains constant: man owes it to himself to reject despair; better to rely on miracles than opt for resignation. By changing himself, man can change the world.
Man asks and God replies. But we don’t understand His replies. We cannot understand them. Because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remain there until we die.
What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life – that is what is abnormal.
Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don’t see them.
For us it meant true equality: nakedness. We trembled in the cold. A.
I speak from experience that even in darkness, it is possible to create light and encourage compassion. There it is: I still believe in man in spite of man.
Dead souls have more to say than living ones.
In fact, the question has haunted me for a long time: Does life have meaning after Auschwitz? In a universe cursed because it is guilty, is hope still possible? For a young survivor whose knowledge of life and death surpasses that of his elders, wouldn’t suicide be as great a temptation as love or faith?
Every murder is a suicide.
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.
But you get used to anything.
Beggars inspired me with mingled feelings of love and fear. I knew that I ought to be kind to them, for they might not be what they seemed.
The tragedy of man is that he doesn’t know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.” He.
The revolver was black and nearly new. I was afraid to even touch it, for in it lay all the whole difference between what I was and what I was going to be.
Dawn is purely a work of fiction, but I wrote it to look at myself in a new way. Obviously I did not live this tale, but I was implicated in its ethical dilemma from the moment that I assumed my character’s place.