Jan Tomasz Gross

“At every stage of the Holocaust decisions had to be made. It is a phenomenon filled with individual initiatives, as the perpetrators were not simply cogs in a machine operating according to preordained rules. Far from it. What this means is that agency in the Shoah, to a degree we perhaps have not yet adequately recognized when thinking and writing about it, rests with a multitude of individuals. and there were, ipso facto, many chokepoints where their initiative could have been slowed down, temporarily halted, even derailed. This was a significant and viable alternative, because from a certain point on it was clear that the Nazis were going to lose the war. Consequently, to say that nothing could have been done once the Nazi policy of killing all the Jews had been set in motion is incorrect. Plenty of people could have done something, or, as it were, not done something. With the result that hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives could have been saved.”
― Jan Tomasz Gross, Złote żniwa

“What renders studying the Holocaust so frustrating is its facelessness: the unacceptable anonymity of victims recognized in their individuality at the moment of death, which every society marks with a solemn ritual, even for the lowliest and poorest. To invoke a million people gassed at Auschwitz, to paraphrase a well-known saying, is only to quote a number. But such is the nature of the subject and the evidence at our disposal that in writing Holocaust history references to staggering numbers of victims cannot be avoided. Nonetheless we yearn to pierce the oblivion to which this relegates individual victims, if only because the violent death they suffered was by nature an intimate and personal experience. Restricted to abstraction, we would not understand what had happened, and our account of the Holocaust would not be truthful. Because, at the risk of stating the obvious, specific individuals were killed in this man-made calamity, and specific individuals carried out the killings.”
― Jan Tomasz Gross, Złote żniwa