Status Updates From Legends of Our Time

“We listened to the short-wave radio, from London and Moscow; not a single broadcast warned us not to leave with the transports; not one disclosed the existence, not even the name of Auschwitz.”

“I often wonder what the world’s reaction would have been had the Nazi machine ground up and burned day after day, not 20,000 Jews, but 20,000 Christians. It is better not to think about that too much.”

“I cannot believe that an entire generation of fathers and sons could vanish into the abyss without creating, by their very disappearance, a mystery which exceeds and overwhelms us. I still do not understand what happened, or how, or why. All the words in all the mouths of the philosophers and psychologists are not worth the silent tears of that child and his mother, who live their own death twice.”

“I should envy those scholars and thinkers who pride themselves on understanding this tragedy in terms of an entire people; I myself have not yet succeeded in explaining the tragedy of a single one of its sons, no matter which.”

“Is it not strange - let us use only that word - that the civilized world waited until it was too late before expressing its moral indignation, waited until there were scarcely any Jews left to be saved?”

“Only where the indigenous populations were themselves eager to become Judenrein did the cattle trains with their suffocating human cargo roll swiftly into the night.”

“By now, however, young Jews in Russia have rejected the solution of assimilation altogether. Although they have had no education in Judaism - except what they have learned from anti-Semitic literature - they cling ferociously to their community. Although non-religious, they celebrate Jewish holidays and sing Jewish songs. Under no circumstances will they allow their Jewishness to be degraded or killed.”

“And I like to think I would have replied: ‘You, also, blessed be your name, you also.’”

“I admit having joined my voice to the others and implored the heavens to grant me mercy and forgiveness. At variance with everything my lips were saying, I indicted myself only to turn everything into derision, into farce. At any moment I expected the Master of the universe to strike me dumb and to say: ‘That is enough - you have gone too far.’”

“My generation has been robbed of everything, even if our cemeteries.”

“Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.”