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.

There is a coalition of anti-Semitism today, the extreme left, the extreme right and in the middle the huge corpus of Islam. I'm worried, I go around with a very heavy heart.

One day - I remember it was a Sabbath afternoon - I came to the synagogue with a book in my hand. I saw a commentary on the Bible by a certain Rabbi Moshe Dessauer, better known as Moses Mendelssohn. An elderly man came up to me - I was then maybe 10 or 12. "What are you studying?" he said. "Dessauer's commentaries," I said. So he gave me a slap on my face.

The deeper the nostalgia and the more complete the fear, the purer, the richer the word and the secret.

Listen to me, kid. Don't forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every many for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even you father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone. Let me give you good advice: stop giving your ration of bread and soup to your old father. You cannot help him anymore. And you are hurting yourself. In fact, you should be getting his rations.

What I do, I want to do with all my being.

What is being lost is the magic of the word. I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the caveman. Caveman couldn't express himself so he put images on walls.