Working on a kind of sequel to Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, I am imagining a character named Bella Levenshteyn, who in her twenties devotes herself to learning Yiddish, the language of her ancestors. At…
I looked at myself in the mirror. A skeleton stared back at me. Nothing but skin and bone. It was the image of myself after death. It was at that instant that the will to…
I tried in my book Kiddush Hashem to picture Auschwitz in seventy pages. But I wrote the book over a period of six years, in pain and agony. And writing it I became a changed…
See, Wiesel has often made this claim quite explicit: I am above politics, my message is so precious and pure it cannot afford to be sullied by compromise. Such is the transcendent dignity of the…
In one of my talks, in the Droste Huelshof Gymnasium in Freiburg, I spoke about my own Holocaust-related experience, as well as about my work as a research analyst at the Nuremberg trial of the…
Before we leave Sassov, let us take a minute to ask ourselves these last questions: Was Reb Moshe-Leib the forerunner of all those helpless men and women who, generations later, eternities later, continued to…
In June 1981 I attended the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Israel. I frequently overheard survivors asking other survivors, “in which camp or ghetto where you? When were you there?” When told, the…
Before starting my work for the U.S. Civil Censorship Division in Germany, I was to spend two weeks in training in Poissy, located just outside Paris. I was joined by other young German and Austrian…
President Bill Clinton once rightly observed that the Holocaust should be “‘ever a sharp thorn in every national memory.’” The same ought to be said of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to…
This week I finished Marcel Reich-Ranicki‘s autobiography, The Author of Himself. He was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and the foremost literary critic in post-war Germany. As I read him, I thought of my…