Sublime

Franz, toi un enfant ? Je laissai échapper un petit rire. Tu es la personne la plus responsable que je connaisse ! — Justement, je me trouve trop responsable, trop prudent. Tu vois, les enfants sont authentiques, ils n’ont pas de filtres. Ils créent et jouent intuitivement. Devenir adulte, c’est enfiler un masque et adopter une identité acceptable.

For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

Rabbi Greenberg explained that we lost 30 percent of the Jewish people during the war, but more than 80 percent of the scholars, mystics, and teachers who could pass on ancient traditions.

On one night in Dresden, more men, women and children were killed than in London during the whole war. More than half of Germany’s towns and cities were destroyed.

They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

So masterfully do we hide death, you would almost believe we are the first generation of immortals. But we are not. We are all going to die and we know it. As the great cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker said, “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.”

And we knew it would only be a matter of time until all traces of us were gone.