Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.

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.

I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.

When I began teaching you hardly could find a university in America or a college where they would teach either Jewish studies or Holocaust studies.

I was 15, not 14, when I was inside there [Auschwitz], 15, and for me both were actually a surprise.

Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the happiness and humanity of the human being.

Politicians, they give the visible aspect of the change, but the change, the root, the anchor are in young people.