It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.
Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.
For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.
You're at the bottom of the mountain. May you climb up without suffering.
War is like night, she said. It covers everything.
Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.
Had the situation not been so tragic, we might have laughed.
I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.
In the beginning there was faith - which is childish; trust - which is vain; and illusion - which is dangerous.
For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.
When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.
Religion is not man's relationship to God, it is man's relationship to man.
We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.
No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.
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 off...
We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive. (pg. 39)
It is not always events that have touched us personally that affect us the most.
Each man was his own executioner and his own victim.
I don't know much about politics, and I don't want to know. That's why I rarely involve myself in politics.