Why, why, why!
(Liliana Segre)
Maybe, what has happened cannot be understood, actually, it must not be understood because understanding means almost justifying it. (Primo Levi)
If understanding is impossible, knowing is necessary, because what has happened can return, consciences can again be seduced and obscured: ours too. (Primo Levi)
I can say that the Auschwitz experience was enough to destroy any religious education that I had left. There is Auschwitz so there cannot be God. I cannot find a solution to the dilemma. I have tried but I cannot find it. (Primo Levi)
The most profound statement that has been pronounced about Auschwitz was not a statement, it was a question. The question was: “Tell me, where was God, in Auschwitz?” The answer: “And the man, where was he?” (William Clark Styron)
“If God exists and you, who were there, are so sure, how could it have allowed the Holocaust? Where was God at that moment?” “It’s a question that has haunted me all my life” Ben said quickly. “It is the same question that people affected by incomprehensible tragedies probably ask themselves. My answer is that there was a God and it was crying”. (Ronald H. Balson)
One day, a surviving friend told me that images of death appear in front of his eyes every night. We find it difficult to understand the death of even one person, how is it possible to understand thousands of them? Memory becomes your enemy, he said. It would be better if the memory, for the survivors, held nothing. I was silent. Him too. We were silent for a long time. Then he added: but if all those images did not show themselves, what would I be? Less than an insect. The dead ask me to be remembered. My insomnia is a guarantee of humanity. (Aharon Appelfeld)