The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.
From Jeff Greenfield: “I once asked Elie Wiesel “Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” “An optimist,” he said. “I have to be.
To live is to betray the dead. We hasten to bury and forget them because we are ashamed; we feel guilty towards them.
On the other hand, how many secular humanists and intellectuals renounced their value system the moment they grasped its futility and uselessness? Sobered, disoriented, and disillusioned, some allowed themselves to be seduced by the ideology of cruelty. The number was significant. The.
The destiny of people cannot be reduced to a sociological or scientific formula; it contains mysterious, if not mystical factors.
I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh. Had I changed that much? So fast? Remorse began to gnaw at me. All I could think was: I shall never forgive them for this. My father must have guessed my thoughts, because he whispered in my ear: “It doesn’t hurt.” His cheek still bore the red mark of the hand.
Indifference always helps the aggressor, never his victims. And what is memory if not a noble and necessary response to and against indifference?
Do you know what that means? ‘Man of God.’ An odd name, isn’t it? It teaches us that what we call angels are only men. There are no real angels. And men? Oh, there are men, all right, unfortunately for the angels and for ourselves. And what is worse is that they are real.
We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.
As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice. Akiba.
The most vital lesson to be learned from the Holocaust era is that Auschwitz was possible because the enemy suceeded in dividing, in separating, in splitting human society, nation against nation, Christian against Jew, young against old. And not enough people cared.
The individual is not a cog in a monstrous machine; it is within his power to modify the very laws which imprison him and the very relationship maintained by the Judge with the accused and witnesses. If it is true, as the Baal Shem says, that it is possible for man to hide the light of dawn emanating from the forest simply by shielding his eyes with his hands, still it is no less true that he can rediscover it by merely moving his hands.
Night. No one prayed, so that the night would pass quickly. The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.
I don’t know whether or not we’ll meet again, Gregor. I could, with an effort, look into the future, but the time’s too short. I’d like you to know only this: separation contains as much of a mystery as meeting. In both cases a door opens: in meeting it opens on the future, in separation on the past. It’s the same door.
The absolute quality of hate explains any human action even if it throws something inhuman around it.
Love is worth as much as prayer. Sometimes more.
Suddenly he stopped in front of me and asked for a cigarette. I had a package of Players in my pocket and wanted to give them to him. But he refused to take the whole package, saying quite calmly that obviously he didn’t have time to smoke them all.
As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. 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 freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.
How do I find God?′ you ask. I do not know how, but I do know where-in my fellow man.
When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.
I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.