I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn't. The victims died but the haters are still here.

I had my religious crisis after the war, not during the war.

It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark.

There is no word in Hebrew for religion, by the way.

Even in darkness it is possible to create light.

The only place where I felt at home, on familiar ground, was the Jewish cemetery. And yet I had never set foot in it before. Children had been forbidden to enter.