Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?
In the beginning there was faith – which is childish; trust – which is vain; and illusion – which is dangerous.
Bread, soup – these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.
Only fanatics – in religion as well as in politics – can find a meaning in someone else’s death.
I believe in God – in spite of God! I believe in Mankind – in spite of Mankind! I believe in the Future – in spite of the Past!
Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.
What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedome depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.
Which is better, truth that is a lie or the lie that is truth?
I have tried to keep memory alive... I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
The more you ask certain questions, the more dangerous they become.
Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don’t know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.
It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.
Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.
Each man was his own executioner and his own victim.
Certain things, certain events, seem inexplicable only for a time: up to the moment when the veil is torn aside.
There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and 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.
Had the situation not been so tragic, we might have laughed.
You shouldn’t act as a spokesperson for someone who’s trying to impose his will on you.
And action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all.
We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves. Or not.