I Am Not Even Alive Enough To

Perhaps One Cannot, What Is More One Must Not, Understand What Happened, Because To Understand [the Holocaust] Is Almost To Justify...no Normal Human Being Will Ever Be Able To Identify With Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, And Endless Others. This Dismays Us, And At The Same Time Gives Us A Sense Of Relief, Because Perhaps It Is Desirable That Their Words (and Also, Unfortunately, Their Deeds) Cannot Be Comprehensible To Us. They Are Non-human Words And Deeds, Really Counter-human.

I Too Entered The Lager As A Nonbeliever, And As A Nonbeliever I Was Liberated And Have Lived To This Day.

I Beg The Reader Not To Go In Search Of Messages. It Is A Term That I Detest Because It Distresses Me Greatly, For It Forces On Me Clothes That Are Not Mine, Which In Fact Belong To A Human Type That I Distrust; The Prophet, The Soothsayer, The Seer. I Am None Of These; I'm A Normal Man With A Good Memory Who Fell Into A Maelstrom And Got Out Of It More By Luck Than By Virtue, And Who From That Time On Has Preserved A Certain Curiosity About Maelstroms Large And Small, Metaphorical And Actual.

I Am Constantly Amazed By Man's Inhumanity To Man.

They Sensed That What Had Happened Around Them And In Their Presence, And In Them, Was Irrevocable. Never Again Could It Be Cleansed; It Would Prove That Man, The Human Species - We, In Short - Had The Potential To Construct An Enormity Of Pain, And That Pain Is The Only Force Created From Nothing, Without Cost And Without Effort. It Is Enough Not To See, Not To Listen, Not To Act.