"Man:" "Who could these men be?" "What authority did they represent?" "K. lived in a country with a legal constitution." "There was universal peace." "all the laws were in force." "Who dared to seize him in his own dwelling?" "Where was the judge he had never seen?" "Where was the high court?" "He raised his hands." "But the hands of one of the partners were already at K. 's throat, while the other thrust the knife into his heart and turned it there twice." "Abba Eban:" "Joseph K., the hero of Franz Kafka's novel the trial, goes to his death without ever knowing what his offense might have been." "His enemy is the unbridled, irrational, emotionless power of a modern totalitarian state." "We have, in this century, too often seen this legalized nightmare occur in reality, a nightmare that we now call Kafkaesque, with its street policemen, street thugs, and concentration camps, where death can become an industry of the state." "It is fitting that Kafka, the prophet of this horror, shouldn't be born a Jew, for the Jews of Europe were to experience the first half of the 20th century as a Kafkaesque ordeal..." "A time which promised them freedom and equality, but which brought them to the brink of annihilation." "At first in the 1920s the mood was optimistic." "19th-century stuffiness was dispelled." "There was a new sense of liberty and even of excess." "Profound changes in how we thought of ourselves, of the world, even of the universe were working down into popular consciousness." "In 1921, Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel laureate." "He came to symbolize not only the new intellectual order, but also the final and complete emancipation of west European Jewry." "Like Freud, he became one of the Jewish patriarchs of the modern world." "The numbers of Jews in scientific, artistic, and public life increased as formal barriers against them fell away." "The steam of modernism in art and its role in the sophistication, the symbolized general license and decadence to those who needed stability and certainty in their lives." "They found the modern world confused, tense, frenzied." "Appeals to order and traditional morality were in vogue." "In Italy, the journalist Mussolini seized power." "Hundreds of political opponents were murdered." "Believing in the disciplines of a vanished past, he adopted the sticks and axes of ancient roman authority as the symbol of his regime- the fasces-fascists-fascism." "It was an age without consensus, an age of extremes- individualism versus conformity, liberty versus subservience to the state." "And for the Jews, inevitably caught up in this conflict, the consequences were to be tragic." "The vast majority of Jews lived in Eastern Europe- far from the world of the few privileged" "Jewish artists, scientists, and businessmen of the West." "Visitors taking home movies in the twenties would notice few signs of modern times in the shtetl, the market-town." "But the appearance of tradition was, to a certain extent, deceptive." "By the early thirties, there were 9.5 million Jews in Europe-mostly Yiddish speaking." "They were increasingly secular and increasingly urban, living in the cities of Poland," "Lithuania, Romania, and Hungary- communities poor in worldly goods, but rich in vitality and diversity." "Some supported traditional religious life." "Others denied it." "Some stressed Jewish difference." "Others sought assimilation." "Whatever road they took, the Jews paid for the freedom, creativity, and prominence which some- a very few of them-achieve." "This limited success fueled traditional hatred of the Jews as aliens and competitors." "Nevertheless Jewish cultural life of all kinds flourished." "[man singing in Yiddish]" "Yiddish produced a popular literature, a tradition of stage plays, and now a small movie industry." "[singing in Yiddish]" "In Hebrew and Polish, as well as in Yiddish, the Jewish press thrived." "There was a vigorous debate about what being Jewish meant- from the traditionalists to the socialists to the Zionists." "Zionism was taken up by a minority who felt increasingly the constraints of anti-semitism all around them." "Girl:" "I did not see any prospects for a future after I finished school." "In this terrible situation," "I took to Zionism like a drowning person to a board." "Boy:" "The one aim is to go to Palestine." "Eban:" "These polish youngsters were smitten by a dream." "Jewish resettlement of Palestine had begun." "It was progressing slowly, but it was underway- another road into the modern world, a road away from the centuries-old traditions of European Jewry." "Traditional Jewish life faced challenges everywhere." "In Russia after the revolution," "Jews who had little enough reason to support the old order were found among the communist leaders." "The revolution reached into every corner of life, and although it broke the walls of czarist oppression, it also directly threatened and although it broke the Jewish traditions." "But the central threat to traditional Jewish life in Europe developed in the west, in the state with the most modern, most assimilated Jewish community" "Germany." "In the 1840s, the Jewish poet Heine had called this land..." "Man:" "A modern Palestine, the home of philosophy, the mother soil of prophecy, and the citadel of pure spirituality." "Eban:" "Defeated in the world war," "Germany was now embodied in a faltering democracy- the Weimar republic." "Inflation and then depression destroyed the value of her people's savings and wages." "The bread lines lengthened as jobs vanished." "Weimar's politics constantly slipped into extremism." "On the far right, the national socialists, the Nazis, made a bid to turn all of Germany's discontents to their advantage." "Although the Nazi platform might of been deranged it was as coherent in its way as any other political program of the day." "It promised bread and work and was seen by many as a clear alternative to the chaos of Weimar." "Man:" "Sieg..." "Crowd:" "Heil!" "Sieg..." "Heil!" "Sieg..." "Heil!" "Eban:" "Nuremburg... a symbol of the glories of Germany's past." "The Nazis were to turn this vision into a dark romance of blood, soil, race, and honor." "By appropriating and distorting all of German history, they mounted a successful appeal across the deep divisions of Weimar society." "The Nazi party began as a revolutionary gang, terrorizing all opponents." "But by the late twenties," "Hitler himself was leaving these tactics behind to seek office through the ballot." "The party became so popular that one out of every 3 Germans without compulsion was regularly voting Nazi." "After the election of January 1933," "Hitler became Weimar's last Chancellor." "His contempt for the democracy he had manipulated was total." "He rapidly silenced all opposition." "Within 6 months of the election, gestures of protest such as this became impossible." "Democracy was banned." "Hitler was dictator." "Mussolini said..." "Man:" "Fascism is a religion." "The 20th century will be known in history as the century of fascism." "Eban:" "Hitler was proclaimed the father of the nation, the son of the race, the spirit of the folk." "A fantasy of total conformity and subjugation fed the Nazis' dark dream." "All the liberal ideals of the modern world were to be cauterized, burned out, put to the flame." "Sigmund Freud, who had in 1924 received the Goethe prize not for his science, but for the purity and elegance of his German prose, wrote," ""What progress we are making." ""In the middle ages, they would have burned me." "Nowadays, they are content with burning my books. "" "But Freud was wrong." "The Nazis were not to be content with the burning of books." "[speaking German]" "Eban:" "The ideas in the books were to be destroyed, and all who persisted in believing in those ideas were to be destroyed as well." "Dachau... a quiet community, a few miles from Munich noted only for the ferocity of its local brown shirts." "it was here that the Nazis set up their first concentration camp, to test the limits of their new power." "They rounded up communists and churchmen, liberals and social democrats- all who opposed them." "German society and the German courts turned a blind eye." "The Nazis, a small band of determined extremists, had successfully overturned the central balance of government." "At first, most Jews, bystanders in Weimar's extremist politics, were not subjected of the concentration camp, unless they were politically active against the regime." "But this was not long to remain the case." "On the street, the Nazis presented the Jew as the enemy who moved all other enemies." "They used the radicalism of a few Jews and the wealth of a few more as sticks with which to beat the whole community." "Nazi hatred had no rational basis." "It was, in essence, an amalgam of racial hysteria and prejudice, a dangerous paranoia." "The early phase of Nazi rule was one of humiliation and public vilification, intermittent street violence, boycotts, and of signs saying, "Jews not wanted. "" "Woman:" "I had walked the streets in Berlin and saw milling crowds in front of various stores with Jewish names." "I felt completely at a loss." "I didn't know what it was all about until I came to the tobacconist." "And I saw a very large crowd standing in front, yelling on top of their voices, "Juden raus." "Juden raus. "" "and suddenly, my blood boiled over, and I made my way through this crowd, went into the shop." "I felt this overwhelming anger in being considered by this people as a Jewess whereas I myself considered myself a German." "I was as German as they were." "[all shouting in German in unison]" "As I left the shop, the crowd outside had made for me a very narrow lane." "I could barely walk through." "I kept on thinking in my head, just show dignity." "Don't be afraid." "Just show dignity." "And they were yelling, "Go to Palestine, juden raus." "get out. "" "[man speaking German]" "Eban:" "This haphazard persecution was not to be the shape that Nazi repression would take." "[speaking German]" "[crowd cheering]" "Throughout the years when Hitler ruled in peace and Germany prospered, the Jewish community was devastated by law after law." "Legislation denied the Jews all those rights which normally only the law can guarantee." "The Nazis twisted every institution of government regarded then and still seen today as vital to the protection of the citizen." "[bells ringing]" "It happened in 3 phases." "First, from 1933..." "Jews excluded from the practice of law." "No Jews allowed to work as civil servants, including teachers, professors, and doctors in public practice." "No Jewish newspaper editors." "In schools and universities, a quota system for Jewish students." "Then in 1935, the Nuremburg decrees" "Jews are declared second-class citizens, with virtually no rights." "All further social and sexual contact with their neighbors is prohibited." "Then a third wave." "By 1939," "Jews would be totally excluded from any economic activity." "Special identity cards would be required and passports stamped with a "j"." "Jews would be excluded completely from universities, beaches, sleeping cars and dining cars on trains, forbidden to drive private vehicles, subject to arbitrary eviction by landlords or divorce by non-Jewish partners, restricted to certain shopping hours." "Gradually, the modern totalitarian state was taking shape, and within it, the Jew was becoming the ultimate outcast." "All this was for less than one in 100 of the population..." "For there were only some 520,000 Jews in a Reich of 60 million." "Yet for most of the others, life, for the first time since the first world war, was good." "There were jobs again, not least because Germany was rearming." "And Germany was once more respected in the world." "In 1936, as a mark of this renewed stature, she hosted the Olympic games." "The country was cleaned up for the occasion." "Jewish athletes were allowed to attend." "Janet Flanner wrote in the New Yorker..." "Woman:" "For Germany, 1936 has been an Olympian season." "Only a determined deaf-and-blind visitor to any corner of this land could fail to see and hear the sight and the sound of Germany's forward march." "Eban:" "It was a forward march that, within 5 years, was to engulf the whole of Europe." "[crowd cheering]" "[crowd chanting in German]" "In every state bordering the Reich lived ancient German-speaking communities." "Each one now became a pretext for Nazi intervention." "Austria was first." "But as the greater Reich grew to contain more Germans, it also expanded to absorb more Jews." "But they were dealt with swiftly." "The process of humiliation, expropriation, and terror, which had taken 5 years to develop in Germany, was unleashed in days and weeks." "But there were protests, as there had been from the very beginning." "Mayor la Guardia had proclaimed..." "Mayor la Guardia:" "I am here this evening to join with my fellow New Yorkers in a great protest not against the German people, but against the present German government." "Eban:" "But all voices of protest were buried." "[air-raid siren]" "The thirties were a time of depression, political violence, and outright armed conflict." "Far from being the most civilized of centuries, the twentieth had begun to reveal the terrifying effects of new technologies." "Wars raged around the globe- from China and Ethiopia to Spain." "To contain the flood of war," "Germany's neighbors developed a policy of appeasement." "After Austria, Germany wanted and was given the German-speaking area of Czechoslovakia." "Czechoslovakia was dismembered." "In such a world, it is not surprising that the Jews were being left to their fate." "In the courts and on the street, the Jews were constantly threatened." "On November 9, 1938," "Goebbels turned out the brown shirts for an orgy of burning and looting." "Kristallnacht- "the night of breaking glass. "" "every synagogue in Germany was attacked by the Nazis." "91 Jews died." "Man:" "I stood there for maybe half an hour." "There was not one attempt to putout the fire in the synagogue." "My father was not there, he comeback late that morning." "He was in bad shape." "We talked together- "What's going to happen now?"" "and one thing he did- and he suggested- he says, "We got to get you out. "" "Eban:" "The truth was unambiguously clear after Kristallnacht." "The Nazis had legally written the Jews out of society." "Now they would physically expel them from the Reich." "But where were the Jews to go?" "In 1938, the world was still suffering from depression and high unemployment." "It was a world of visas, immigration quotas, and affidavits." "Man:" "There was a family, a non-Jewish family, living in Wilmington, Delaware, who had offered an affidavit for myself to get out." "That affidavit, unfortunately, had a number next to it." "That number was somewhere-18,000." "and when we went to the American consulate to try to find out when I would able to leave- to leave Germany to emigrate to the United States," "I was told that the year was 1942." "Eban:" "Yet some doors were ajar." "Palestine was there as a haven." "The Zionist dream was still alive." "A virtual British colony since 1918," "Palestine presented a most un-European face." "It was an undeveloped multi-ethnic Middle Eastern land, and for most immigrants, it offered a vivid contrast to the Europe that they had fled." "Woman:" "Above all, it was so completely different to anything I had known back home- the sharpness of the colors, the scents, the smells, and the variety of the people." "Outside the cities, there were no trees, no woods, no rivers, no brooks, just here and there, oasis of dazzling flowers and citrus groves and then unremitting sand." "[group singing in Hebrew]" "Eban:" "Despite hardships, the dream was being clothed in reality." "The Jewish community was more than 200,000 strong." "It had begun to remake the land." "And with an effort every bit as hard, it had reestablished Hebrew as an everyday language." "A whole new Jewish city, Tel Aviv, was being built." "A new society, a new culture was being fashioned." "The Hebrew university was founded." "A national symphony orchestra was established, and Toscanini conducted it as a protest against the European fascists." "As more Jews arrived, relations with the Arab majority worsened." "In 1939, the British responded to Arab unrest by limiting Jewish migration to a total of 75,000 over 5 years and then no more Jews at all." "The door was to be slammed." "The community protested, but the policy remained unchanged." "It was a policy to be repeated by nation after nation." "Nearly everywhere, the refugees were to be refused entry." "This was a time of an exodus by every available route, a time of a wandering as tragic as any ever suffered by the Jews." "907 Germans Jews boarded the steamship the St. Louis, heading for Cuba." "They came within feet of safety, but were turned away." "Pleading was useless." "Next they approached Miami," "But the US coast guard denied them entry." "Unable to land in the new world, they were forced to return to the old." "The escape had failed." "The opportunities for further escape attempts were fast disappearing." "Throughout Europe, tensions were mounting." "Once more, the world was on the brink." "The Reich wanted western Poland." "September 1939- the Nazis crossed the polish border, and the world was at war." "The word "lightning" in German, blitz, acquired for all the peoples who lived between the north sea and the Urals, a frightful new meaning." "The Nazis waged lightning war, blitzkrieg, across an entire continent." "Nation after nation was struck down." "Total war involved people, ordinary people, in unprecedented numbers." "Millions of families were split up under the Nazi guns." "Many would never see each other again." "Each conquest-and for 3 years there was little else- each conquest, especially in the east of Europe, added to the number of Jews within the Reich." "For every Jew within his grasp in 1933," "Hitler had nearly 20 in 1941." "So, to contain and control them in all the cities of the East, the Nazis confined the Jews to what they termed "ghettos. "" "From Kazimierz, a suburb of the polish city of Krakow, the Jews were herded together across the river into the poorest sections of the town." "Facing the all-encompassing power of the Nazis, the Jews were doubly imprisoned- held in the ghettos and surrounded by occupying armies." "Physical resistance was futile, but moral resistance was everywhere." "Forbidden public prayer, they prayed in secret." "In back rooms on long benches near a table, little schoolchildren sat and learned in secret." "Jews worked." "The Jews believed, needed to believe, that if the work was required, then so was the worker." "Above all, there was a sense of foreboding." "however hellish the ghetto, families were still intact." "There was a semblance of order." "But the Jews feared that worse was yet to come." "Woman:" "God, please let us stay here." "Show us you're merciful." "If my senses are accurate, this is the last paradise we will ever know." "Please let us stay in this heavenly hell forever." "We are tightly packed in the ghetto." "But that must be a fine way to live in comparison to deportation." "Did God take leave of his senses?" "Something terrible is coming." "There are 7 of us in 9 feet of space." "Let them put 14 together, 28, we will sleep on top of each other." "We will get up at 3 AM, not 4:00, stand in line for 10 hours, anything... anything." "Just let our families stay together." "Eban: 5,000 a month were dying of starvation and disease in Warsaw's ghetto." "But this was not enough for the Germans." "And now the Nazis made their unique contribution to the annals of European anti-semitism." "They no longer said, as had their medieval forebears," ""You cannot live amongst us as Jews. "" "They no longer said, as they themselves had for nearly a decade," ""You cannot live amongst us. "" "Now they said something new." "they said, "You cannot live. "" "As the Germans swept into the heart of the Jewish communities of western Russia in 1941, close behind the front lines came the mobile killing squads of the SS." "In the 16 months to the autumn of 1942, members of the German army as well as Ukrainian and Baltic pro-Nazis, shot nearly 1.5 million Jews- 2 human beings a minute for every hour of every day for nearly 500 days." "But the "problem," as the Nazis termed it, persisted." "Early in 1942, here at a villa in Wannsee outside Berlin, the leaders of the German government met in order to refine the plan- already underway in the East- of systematically murdering every last Jew in its control." "By spring, the logistics of death were in place." "Bureaucratic processes down to the last minute detail of costing, supplies, and scheduling were put to the service of murder." "Leitner:" "We drag ourselves to the railroad station." "The sun is mercilessly hot." "People are fainting, babies screaming." "We, the young and healthy teenagers, are totally spent." "What must the old, the sick feel, totally stripped of our dignity, leaving the town we were born in, grew up in?" "What happens after this long wait?" "Where are we off to?" "75 to a car." "No toilets, no doctors, no medication." "We squeeze my mother into a sitting position on the backpack." "Her face has an otherworldly look." "She knows she will not live, but she wants us to live, desperately." "All these years I have carried with me her face of resignation and hope and love." ""Stay alive, my darlings- all six of you. "" "We started the journey of ugliness on may 29." "We headed for Auschwitz." "We arrived on may 31." "Man:" "Our line moved slowly forward until we came face to face with an elegant SS man- leather coat, gloves- a young man." "And the thumb went up, and the thumb went down." "up-you lived, down-you died." "We didn't know what it meant." "We had no idea." "Leitner:" "The scent of spring wasn't delicious." "The earth didn't smile." "It shrink in pain." "The air was filled with the stench of death, unnatural death." "The smoke was thick." "The sun couldn't crack through." "The scent was the smell of burning flesh." "The burning flesh was your mother." "I am condemned to walk the earth for all my days with the stench of burning flesh in my nostrils." "My nostrils are damned." "May is damned." "May should be abolished." "May hurts." "There should be only 11 months in a year." "May should be set aside for tears for 6 million years to cleanse the earth." "Eban:" "Millions died, but contrary to the records made by the Nazis, they did not all die without protest, for despite the starvation and brutality and the unbridled power of their guards, some rebelled." "In Auschwitz, in the lowest circle of hell, the special squad charged with the disposal of the dead attempted a revolt." "In Treblinka, the underground blew up the arsenal, and 200 inmates escaped." "In Sobibor, the entire surviving population rebelled." "Man: "Comrades, forward," I shouted." "The cries echoed through the camp as 600 of us, pain-racked and tormented, surged forward to life and freedom." "Eban:" "The grass has grown over many concentration camps" "Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Theresienstadt, Bergen-Belsen." "Perhaps the word "monument"" "is the best way of describing their significance today." "There are across the world monuments to man's gift of beauty." "There are monuments to man's creativity." "There are monuments to man's wealth." "Here scatter over Europe there are this monuments, monuments to human cruelty, suffering anguish, and resistance." "The ghettos are not preserved." "Nevertheless, they offer witness to the strength of the human spirit, for here, too, resistance, when weapons could be found and preparations made, became rebellion." "In Bialystok, in Vilna, in 105 ghettos, there was armed resistance." "In Warsaw, the young Jews, the under-20s, the radicals, ambushed the Nazis." "We were young boys and girls." "We had no military training before." "We prepared quite a big mine under the road where the Germans marched in, and we switched on, and the mine exploded." "this was really the first time I saw dead Germans." "The Germans, of course, were astonished." "When they came near to us, we had thrown them a handmade grenade we had- the Molotov bottles- and then again, we saw some Germans burning like a torch." "We just wanted to die with dignity." "That's all what we wanted and to take revenge." "Eban:" "After weeks of fighting, the Germans retook the ghetto building by building." "Elsewhere, resistance continued." "[man singing in German]" "Where the endless forests were in reach of the ghettos, thousands escaped to join the soviet partisans, harassing the Nazis behind the lines." "From the ghetto of Minsk alone, 10,000 fled to reinforce the fighters in the forest." "All in all, one estimate says, as many as 40,000 Jews were under arms in the East." "Although these episodes had limited strategic significance, for the Jews they were a crucial step away from their traditional behavior." "The responses of European Jewry to this persecution had been to no avail." "Obedience to every last whim of their persecutors had brought them no respite." "They faced the ultimate barbarity." "It understood only power." "So, Jewish communities, however few, however futile their resistance, rose in arms against their oppressors." "Beyond their heroism, beyond the search for dignity and death," "Jews came to understand the necessity of power." "This was a crucial lesson." "There is a lesson also in remembering the righteousness of ordinary people in every European nation." "Denmark-until the fall of 1943, the quietest of Nazi occupations." "The 7,500 Danish Jews lived in peace under the Nazis unmarked and unenslaved." "Orders were drawn up to begin deportations." "The Danes refused to cooperate." "Among the protests, a pastor cried from the pulpit," ""I would rather die with the Jews than live with the Nazis. "" "The Nazis planned the roundup for the Jewish New Year" "September 1943." "The Danes hid all but 477 Jews in factories, in hospitals, in private homes." "Over the next several nights, the Jews were placed in boats, any boats, and ferried over the narrow waters to safe and neutral Sweden." "The Danish Jews were blessed with neighbors who abhorred persecution of any kind." "Others across Europe also found ways of protecting their Jewish neighbors." "There were public demonstrations in Bulgaria." "Swiss and Swedish visas were issued in Budapest." "Everywhere, at great risk, single Jews or, more often, Jewish children were hidden." "Very few were saved." "But each life is a testament to what might be called the Danish spirit." "In contrast, the governments of the unenslaved world witnessed the genocide of the Jews almost in silence." "And they did witness it." "By the spring of 1944, the allies knew the exact nature of the camps from Auschwitz escapees." "But although allied bombers flew over rail lines to the camp," "The death trains were never disrupted." "The Jews were not alone in their agony." "In the camps, the Nazis murdered millions of Russians, Serbs, Poles, one out of 3 of Europe's Romany gypsies-all opposition- the mentally ill and the chronically sick," "Jehovah's witnesses, homosexuals." "Elsewhere the innocent were also dying sometimes in atrocities as bad as the camps." "Here, in Oradour in central France, on the morning of the 10th of June 1944, the Nazis murdered the entire population." "They shot the men and then killed 500 children and women in the village church." "The specific reason for the massacre was not announced and has never been discovered." "Oradour-sur-Glane has never been rebuilt." "The Nazis were fighting 2 wars- one without rules against the Jews, the other a general war." "But the 2 wars were, in fact, one." "Believing that one group of human beings, the Jews, were vermin led the Nazis to treat all their fellows as such." "It became one war against the value of individual life." "For all free people, the war became something more- a crusade against a terrible evil." "Beyond the usual claims of justice and right, the allies- Roosevelt and Churchill- argued that the Nazis were an uncommon breed of evil- antihumanistic, the very antithesis of civilization." "The cost of the conflict was enormous- more than 30 million dead- the majority, civilians." "The allies ruthlessly pursued victory in response to the Nazis' total war." "The Reich was to be destroyed as effectively as it had devastated its neighbors." "Summer, 1944:" "D-day." "Germany careened into defeat, invaded from East and West, and the Reich that was to have lasted a thousand years drowned in a sea of blood." "And so, finally, it was over." "The particular plague that had tormented the world for 12 years passed away and was stilled." "For the millions of soldiers, among them hundreds of thousands of Jews in the allied armies, the time had come to go home." "But in Europe in the summer of 1945, 11 million prisoners of war and displaced people were uncertain where home might be... none more so than the remnant of the death camps." "100,000 Jewish survivors fled into the British and American occupied areas of Germany from the East." "Some Jews tried returning to the polish cities, but within a year, there was another pogrom." "over 8 centuries of Jewish life in Poland virtually came to an end." "This is Krakow, Poland, today." "The Jewish community still has a warden, but now it numbers a scant 700." "Once it was nearly 60,000 strong." "The Jewries of central Europe were, as the Nazis had desired, very nearly wiped from the face of the earth." "And the secular Yiddish culture that flourished here has disappeared forever." "The Jewish presence, which had contributed to the history of these lands for more than 8 centuries, was savagely cut off." "But the Nazis attacked far more than the communities of one small European ethnic minority." "And the significance of the destruction of those communities is of a moment greater than the limits of Jewish history." "The Nazis challenged the values of civilization." "They offered a grim plan for the future- a world in which doubt was forbidden, a world of absolute truths, a world of obsessive order and rigid conformity, a world without human diversity." "And they were willing to go to any lengths to achieve their purpose." "But in the end, at a cost almost too great to bear, they were defeated." "None can know the meaning of that narrow victory so well as those who witnessed the very eye of the storm." "Man:" "There is nothing else my generation could do but bear witness and, therefore, bear witness for humanity." "They thought they could kill 6 million Jews and go on as though the 6 million Jews didn't die." "Well, together with the Jew, the image of man was destroyed." "We have all the reasons in the world to despair and to give up on man and to give up on culture, on civilization, on language, and even on God." "But we won't permit it to happen." "We have the reasons to do so, but we will not invoke them." "And in spite of everything, we shall go on believing." "Eban:" "Out of these ashes comes the understanding that no one's life can be guaranteed without constant struggle." "Belief in the ultimate ability of humankind to overcome the darkest, most brutal of forces is the light which must carry us forward."