Usually, very early in the morning. German laborers were going to work. They would stop and look at us without surprise. One day when we had come to a stop, a worker took a piece of bread o...
To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time. SOMETIMES
The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.
Only fanatics — in religion as well as in politics — can find a meaning in someone else’s death.
Life is really fascinated only by death. It vibrates only when it comes in contact with death.
Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.
Just as there are predatory birds, so there are predatory ideas: I came under their spell. . . .Just as the survivors say that no one will ever understand the victims, what I must tell you is that you...
It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.
It was a destructive novel of acquired ideas. To finally wake up in a state of creative anguish, to lose oneself in order to find oneself again, to sleep in the arms of a beautiful student whose name...
Indifference is the sign of sickness, a sickness of the soul more contagious than any other.
I remember a young Hungarian Jew, his shoulders stooped like an old man's, who confessed to some infraction so as to be beaten in his uncle's stead. I am young, he said, and stronger than he. He was y...
I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.
He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.
Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for thems...
Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because he kept six crematoria working day and ni...
Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages...
The torturer scores a victory over his victim when the latter, in the grip of doubt, begins to torture himself.
Which is better, truth that is a lie or the lie that is truth?
What are You, my God? I thought angrily. How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith, their anger, their defiance? What does Your grandeur mean, Master of the Univer...