Richard L. Rubenstein > Quotes

“In her afterword to Nightfather, a remarkable novel about a young daughter’s poignant attempts to understand her Holocaust-survivor father, the Dutch writer Carl Friedman—whose father was a Holocaust survivor—quotes the poet Remco Campert, another author from the Netherlands. “Resistance does not start with big words,” Campert says, “it starts with small deeds. Asking yourself a question / that is how resistance starts / then putting that question to somebody else.”61 Nazism and the Holocaust assaulted the values that human beings hold most dear when we are at our best. Resistance to protect them came too late then; hence resistance continues to be urgent now, and it begins perpetually with small deeds, the raising of critical questions among them. Approaches to Auschwitz show that nothing human, natural, or divine guarantees respect for those values, but nothing is more important than our commitment to defend them, for they remain as fundamental as they are fragile, as precious as they are endangered.”
― Richard L. Rubenstein, Approaches to Auschwitz, Revised Edition: The Holocaust and Its Legacy