Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible, it is not su...rprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We're built, as a nation, on the grounds of a concentration camp. It's like saying "OK, here's Auschwitz. Here's where we'll start... our country."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating; but the radical and universal c...onsciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us; perhaps we shall have to colonize the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can d...ance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschw...itz in the morning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How do you describe the sorting out on arriving at Auschwitz, the separation of children who see a father or mother going away, ne...ver to be seen again? How do you express the dumb grief of a little girl and the endless lines of women, children and rabbis being driven across the Polish or Ukrainian landscapes to their deaths? No, I can't do it. And because I'm a writer and teacher, I don't understand how Europe's most cultured nation could have done that. For these men who killed with submachine-guns in the Ukraine were university graduates. Afterwards they would go home and read a poem by Heine. So what happened?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The symmetrical piles of white bodies, the round white breast-shapes of the heaps,... the smell of the smoke, the dogs the wires the rope the hunger. It had happened to others. There was a word for us. I was: a Jew.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »