When I’m asked to answer this question
- what the Holocaust means to me -
I have
a very short sentence:
Holocaust has simply become my life.
All the more does it preoccupy me,
and every survivor,
why I, of all people, survived.
That’s a very
agonizing question because there
was no rule for
whether you survived or not.
It was so ...
When I went back to Birkenau sixty years later ...
and I also talk a lot about how it struck me
that I didn’t find anything there that I had left behind.
My mother was thirty-nine years old and in the best of health;
my cousin was twenty-six.
Both of them had the same chance of surviving that I did.
They also fulfilled the requirements of being between sixteen
and forty-four years old and healthy.
But they didn’t survive, and I did.
Why?
I think the reason I survived is precisely
because I have set myself the life goal,
or chosen as my life’s calling,
to talk about the Holocaust for as long as I can talk at all.
And I do talk about it a lot.
The one thing I, as a survivor, can do
to live at all
has to be the decision
to live with my traumas.
I don’t want them to break me, to drive me mad.
I want to live a relatively normal life,
so I have to acknowledge
that I can’t cope with my traumas.
I have to live with them.
But that wasn’t a must.
You could have said no,
but you didn’t say no.
When you now look back after so many years,
it’s very hard to explain,
but our lives these days are full
of questions that aren’t so hard, but then are really very hard after all,
questions you have to answer with yes or no.
And where do you get
the moral basis for saying no in one case and yes in another?
That’s the eternal question every human being faces.
All over the world,
a common thought has to be created against the worst things,
things that are not allowed to be,
and if that doesn’t become part of the world’s yardstick,
then the world can’t be improved.
In my opinion, it’s the weapons.
The production of weapons should be stopped.
No more weapons -
in my opinion, that’s the only solution.
There must be no weapons.
Everything passes; after all, in the end money is also spent on weapons,
and that’s the worst thing, because they always stop working at some point
and then new ones have to be produced.
And they keep inventing more and more terrible weapons, don’t they?
And when that’s no longer possible,
then all that money will be available,
and you can do anything with it, you can free the world of misery.
But if this common thought never comes ...
Yes, that is my hope.