The Holocaust

When the world made no sense, these Jews still cared to know what they should do or not do. When the world ignored G-d and His commandments, they determined that they would not...

Is G-d responsible? How can His actions (or inaction) be defended? Should they be defended?

G-d created the rules of nature and logic. Could He not have created a world in which peace, harmony and light can be fully appreciated even when not preceded by pain and suffering?

"Take these and run to Haumshalagplatz. Run! Tell the kapos that your daughter is among the captured. This is an unwritten law among us -- no snatching of policemen's children"

Reb Azriel David opened his eyes to the sight of the singing train. In a choked voice, he cried: "I will give half of my portion in the World to Come to whoever can take my song to the Modzitzer Rebbe!"

I first heard of Sammy Rosenbaum in 1965, when a Mrs. Rawicz from Rabka came into my office in Vienna to testify at a War Crimes trial

At first, I was awed by his courage. But the next day I realized, to my horror, that this man was 'renting out' the siddur to people in exchange for bread...

Slowly the shelter came to life. My mother got up and prepared breakfast--a few crackers with some jam we still had left, but neither my two sisters nor my mother touched the food...

"Listen to me, Mrs. Rosenberg," her heavy face was flushed with excitement. "Let me take her. Why should she die, the innocent babe? I will care for her as if she was my own. I never had children, you know. Give her to me..."

The soldier stared at the boy, fighting back tears. "Over these four terrible years, this is the first live Jewish child I have seen..."

We were all looking away; we had not known that he was severely afflicted with Parkinson's disease. Then we heard this big bang on the table: "Gentlemen, look at me, and look at me right now. Who can tell me what the lesson of the Holocaust is?"

The year was 1945, just after the war. The place: a refugee camp somewhere in Germany. Jews just out of concentration camps had gathered in a barracks-turned-Synagogue for the Yom Kippur prayers

The woman seemed oblivious to my words. "A knife," she repeated. "I must have a knife. Now. Before it is too late"

My best friend was a girl of my age named Jeanette. One morning when I came to play, I saw her family being forced at gunpoint into a truck. I ran home and told my mother. "Don't worry," she said, "Jeanette will be back soon..."

Why can we say that biblical tragedies were punishments, yet contemporary ones are "the mysterious way of G-d"? Have today's rabbis changed their perception of G-d to fit what's politically correct?

Over this one thing
I implore You:
That my cup of gratitude
With a tear is laced

How tefillin saved a person's life again and again -- during the Holocaust and in its immediate aftermath.

Crystallizing slowly over time in the old man's soul was the singular obligation of telling the story of that child's last moments

Auschwitz showed us that just as man can sink as low as the basest animal, so can he rise to the level of angels