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Zusatztext “Hassidic stories and rabbinic interpretations shine through the personal reminiscences and humble prayers addressed to God.” — Saturday Review “In this book of anecdotes! autobiographical fragments! conversations with victims! introspective analyses! dialogues of faith! and essays! [Wiesel] searches among the testimony of the survivors and contemporary events for possible answers or lessons that Auschwitz might have offered the generation born since the war. Society! he states! has not changed! and nothing has been learned.” — Publishers Weekly “In an incredibly moving collection of essays! tales! and autobiographical sketches! Wiesel describes the agonizing plight of the Holocaust survivor who must try to relate that which is beyond words! and to search for meaning in experiences that defy understanding. Many of the haunting themes! memorable characters! and striking episodes of Wiesel’s novels are intimately revealed in these pages.” — Library Journal Informationen zum Autor ELIE WIESEL was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The author of more than fifty internationally acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, he was Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and University Professor at Boston University for forty years. Wiesel died in 2016. Klappentext Twenty years after he and his family were deported from Sighet to Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel returned to his town in search of the watch-a bar mitzvah gift-he had buried in his backyard before they left. Twenty-five years. A quarter century. And we pause, trying to find our bearings, trying to understand: what and how much did these years mean? To some a generation, to others an eternity. A generation perhaps without eternity. Children condemned never to grow old, old men doomed never to die. A solitude engulfing entire peoples, a guilt tormenting all humanity. A despair that found a face but not a name. A memory cursed, yet refusing to pass on its curse and hate. An attempt to understand, perhaps even to forgive. That is a generation. Ours. ### For the new one it will soon be ancient history. Unrelated to today’s conflicts and arguments. Without impact on the aspirations and actions of adolescents eager to live and conquer the future. The past interests them only to the extent that they can reject it. Auschwitz? Never heard of it. And yet there is a logic in history. The future is but a result of conditions past and present. Everything is connected, everything has its place. Man makes the transition from the era of holocaust silence to the era of communication with remarkable ease. Once walled in by ghettos, man now takes flight to the moon. If today we live too quickly, it is because yesterday we died too quickly. If today we endow machines with increasingly wide powers, it is because the generation before us so foolishly left its fate and decisions in the hands of man. ### Spring 1945: emerging from its nightmare, the world discovers the camps, the death factories. The senseless horror, the debasement: the absolute reign of evil. Victory tastes of ashes. Yes, it is possible to defile life and creation and feel no remorse. To tend one's garden and water one's flowers but two steps away from barbed wire. To experiment with monstrous mutations and still believe in the soul and immortality. To go on vacation, be enthralled by the beauty of a landscape, make children laugh—and still fulfill regularly, day in and day out, the duties of killer. There was, then, a technique, a science of murder, complete with specialized laboratories, business meetings and progress charts. Those engaged in its practice did not belong to a gutter society of misfits, not could they be dismissed as just a collection of rabble. Many held degrees in philosophy, sociology, biology, general medicine, psychiatry and t...
