auschwitz, n.Definitions

Auschwitz is that without which there is no German identity

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: They're only animals.

Auschwitz is a place where the only exit was by way of the chimney.

Auschwitz is a praxis based on a new principle: for one portion of mankind, existence itself became a crime, punishable by humiliation, torture, and death. And the new world produced by this praxis included two kinds of inhabitants, those who were given the "punishment" and those who administered it.

Auschwitz is without an answer. To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy, and it is Israel that enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.

Auschwitz cries out with the pain of immense suffering and pleads for a future of respect, peace and encounter among peoples.

Auschwitz is a horrific revelation of the nature of Western civilization, and it ‘opens up, or closes, a quite other history than the one we have known up until now.

Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air: rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.