Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.
In the space of a few minutes the sky turned black and it began to rain.
Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.” by Primo Levi in Drowned.
This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen.
We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.
There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
Each of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; In each the trace of each.
Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.