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.

Both incest and the Holocaust have been subject to furious denial by perpetrators and other individuals and by highly organised groups such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the Committee for Historical Review. Incest...

The West’s post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a...

I had no real communication with anyone at the time, so I was totally dependent on God. And he never failed me.

In the mid-1980s, world Jewry still has the need to recall its “holocaust” even by trying to prevent the election of the former U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim as president of Austria.

But then, staring at the label on one crate, which readSWORD-CANE-DLUBECK SHOE TREE-HORASUITS (3)-HORAASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)-HORAJosef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not...

At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in...

I made a painting that has holes in it. Why is there holes? Because God says to us, I cannot do all. I can create you, but I cannot do it all. You have to...

Gideon conquers, the church conquers, we conquer, because faith conquers. But the victory belongs not to Gideon, the church, or ourselves, but to God. And God’s victory means our defeat, our humiliation; it means God’s...

Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn’t do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives....

And with every cry that escapes a childs lips.. With every piercing scream that leaves a womans mouth, and with every tear that stains a mans face, a small part of me dies each time.....

I had survived the work gangs in the ghetto. Baked bread under cover of night. Hidden in a pigeon coop. Had a midnight bar mitzvah in the basement of an abandoned building. I had watched...

He had defended himself against death from without, and then it had carried him off from within.

Children are being killed, because some “adults” think life is a game.Something is amiss.When children shoot up other children in school, it’s a national tragedy, and a week of mourning.When grown men are killing unarmed...

Not everyone is capable of sacrificing his own life. So it is, always has been and always will be.

Again, a conversation with the doctor. We always come back to the same point: “The church may not mix in politics.” he says. And I tell him that when you are a Christian and profess...

Surely there is no more wretched sight that the human body unloved and uncared for.

Summer came.For the book thief, everything was going nicely.For me, the sky was the color of Jews.When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. When their fingernails had...

The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek those numbers...