When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary:...

It is a strange world It is possible to discuss everything but the Holocaust.

They’ll never know we were here.

But Anja. I hear Anja’s voice. Maybe I am insane. I hear her crying. I see her alone in the trees. I remember being alone and humiliated. I remember, too, the fat little boy hiding...

What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of...

We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything–death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere...

The town was more than ready to accept the window dressing that hid the ugly truth of Joe’s guilt. Some shared the secrets and kept the silence. Others would not have believed if they had...

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she...

Hopefully, this new awareness and attention to the Holocaust will lead to a strengthening of those groups currently leading the struggle against anti-Semitism, a rejection of those groups both within Europe but also within the...

I felt peace, even though I was still scared to death. I thought that, whatever would happen to me – I could still be killed. I didn’t know – and in what I’d already been...

We did not speak of what we had seen. At the time, to speak of it seemed worse than sacrilege: We had witnessed a thing so terrible that it acquired a dreadful holiness. It was...

[S]ex trafficking and mass rape should no more be seen as women’s issues than slavery was a black issue or the Holocaust was a Jewish issue. These are all humanitarian concerns, transcending any one race,...

I shook with helplessness and rage, but also with fear. This was what fighting back earned you. More abuse. More death. Half a dozen Jews would be murdered today because one man refused to die...

Should have taken warning it’s justPeople mourningRunning, hiding, lostYou can’t find, find a place to go, so it’sRed skies at nightRed skies at night, whoa oh, oh oh oh, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh… red skies at night, red...

Rumors are the children of truth.

normal,” sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future.Yet, this is exactly the lesson we must learn...

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that ‘other’ cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to...

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.

I frequently detect a hint of satisfaction in the accounts that manage to excavate moral and individual responsibility from the historical debris. Perhaps it is because of the unspoken belief that changing the people will...

learning the Holocaust meant to scare you but to deepen your understanding of the world.

Israeli society has an moral duty to honor the Holocaust survivors, and to take care of them in the twilight of their days.

They thought we were stupid to do it, (hide Jews) of course; in fact, it was beyond their comprehension that we would risk so much for Jews.

Escape was not our goal since it was so unrealistic. What we wanted was to survive, to live long enough to tell the world what had happened in Buchenwald.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who stop to consider the antithesis; that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.

The ceremony was fast so we wouldn’t be caught. When it was over, the men all whispered ‘Mazel tov’ and climbed back onto their shelves. I went up to the boy and pressed the wooden...

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.

Part of her revolted against the insanity of the rules. Part of her was grateful. In a world of chaos, any guidelines helped. And she knew that each day she remained alive, she remained alive....

To understand how that astounding moral blindness was possible, it is helpful to think of the workers of an armament plant who rejoice in the ‘stay of execution’ of their factory thanks to big new...

To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns...

A miracle occurred, two hundred pure souls, condemned to death, did not weep. Not one of them ran away. None tried to hide. Like stricken swallows they clung to their teacher and mentor, to their...

An inch of gold can’t buy an inch of time

Learning the Holocaust is not meant to scare you but to deepen your understanding about the world.

Today, when there are fewer Holocaust survivors alive to share their experiences, the personal touch, the personal contact is important. We understand the importance of those elements in shaping the world, in shaping our minds.

To me it was real war and my life was at stake, and I believe that all those clandestine spy games we played as children helped when the Occupation came.

The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in...

I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.

Remember: You are no one. You have no name. You do not speak, you do not look at them, you do not volunteer for anything. You work, bot not so hard they notice you. Gizela....

I could have been 23 next July I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.

Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the...

I believe in the sun when it isn’t shining, I believe in love even when I don’t feel it. I believe in God even when He’s silent.

Die Judenfrage,’ it used to be called, even by Jews. ‘The Jewish Question.’ I find I quite like this interrogative formulation, since the question—as Gertrude Stein once famously if terminally put it—may be more absorbing...

Suffering took hold of me like a magic spell abolishing all differences between friends and strangers.

…I was there when we opened the gates. Some of these poor wretches running out were so emaciated they actually died from the excitement of being liberated. I saw it happen several times. These people...

But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to...

When I was in Auschwitz, I kept asking, why am I here, what did I do wrong? What did my grandfather do wrong? And a young American man, he put me in the right knowledge....

O Father, console them and please spare our country from that terrible disaster, not because we are any better but only out of grace. And if it has to be different, then teach me to...

Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.

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.

And you wanted to escape,’ a man near me whispered to another man. ‘You wanted to run off into the woods and fight. But do you see? Do you see what the rest of them...

Trivializing the Holocaust is the last thing I want to do.