I came to the conclusion that I am free to choose my own suffering. But I am not free to consent to someone else's suffering.

That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.

An indifference to suffering makes humans inhuman

When adults wage war, children perish.

Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?

John XXI was a very great pope and he's the one who actually corrected the liturgy. He did so because of his friend Jules Isaac, a French Jewish historian who was a friend of John Paul, of John 23rd, and he convinced him and he changed the liturgy, no more Jew, the perfidious Jew and so forth and now, and don't speak any more of the Jews killing Christ. Things have changed.

But because of his telling, many who did not believe have come to believe, and some who did not care have come to care. He tells the story, out of infinite pain, partly to honor the dead, but also to warn the living - to warn the living that it could happen again and that it must never happen again. Better than one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all. (vi)