Whether culmination or aberration of history, the Holocaust transcends history. Everything about it inspires fear and leads to despair. The dead are in possession of a secret that we, the living, are neither worthy of nor capable of recovering….The ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted. It was easier for Auschwitz inmates to imagine themselves free than for free persons to imagine themselves in Auschwitz.
—Elie Wiesel, in Irving Abrahamson, editor, Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel, 158.
I work assiduously in my teaching against the view of the Holocaust as ineffable, inexpressible, and beyond imagination, or metaphor, or understanding.
—Anita Norich, Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust, 1.
