I don't see the junk youth. I only meet students, and even those who are not formally at the university, if they come to listen to me, they come to read me, it means they are not junk students.

I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.

Everything is in it: the promise and the hope and the fear and the challenge and the defiance. The test is a double test: Just as God tested Abraham, Abraham tested God: "Let's see if you really want me to go ahead with it and kill my son." Then the angel says, "Do not raise your hand against the boy" [Genesis 22:12]. It was the Angel of God who says this, not God. God was embarrassed. [All laugh]

The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.

Except that a human being is both the public and the private. We are both, private and public in the same person.

The darkest days in my life after the war, after the war, was when I discovered that the ... most of the members and commanders of the Einsatz group that were doing the killings, not even in gas chambers, but killing with machine guns, had college degrees from German universities and PhD's and MD's. Couldn't believe it.