Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naïve query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through th… - Viktor Frankl

حينما يجد الإنسان أن مصيره هو المعاناة، فإن عليه أن يتقبل آلامه و معاناته كما لو أنها مهمة مفروضة عليه، وهي مهمة فريدة ومتميزة. و عليه أن يعترف بالحقيقة بأنه حتى في المعاناة فهو فريد و وحيد في الكون. لا يستطيع أحد أن يخلصه من معاناته أو يعاني بدلاً منه. ففرصته الفريدة تكمن في الطريقة التي يتحمل بها أعباءه و متاعبه

"Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints. And today you need no longer hesitate to use the word "saints": think of Father Maximilian Kolbe who was starved and finally murdered by an injection of carbolic acid at Auschwitz and who in 1983 was canonized.

You may be prone to blame for invoking examples that are the exceptions ot the rule. "Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt" (but everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find) reads the last sentence of the Ethics of Spinoza. You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to "saints." Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority . More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

So let us be alert-alert in a twofold sense:

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.

And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake."

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.