From a material perspective, it might not always pay to be honest, but from a moral perspective, it's always the right thing. That applies to a frail… - Władysław Bartoszewski

As a historian I refuse to recognize an epochal boundary before the fact.

For most of us, concentration camps and extermination camps are the culmination of the persecution of the Jews, a devastating symbol of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. Much more shocking, in my eyes, however, is the calm and calculated origin of the tragedy that was soon to take concrete form in Auschwitz and other extermination camps at a convivial lunch-time meeting at Wannsee in Berlin on 20 January 1942, a meeting that had already come to a close by early afternoon of the same day. The events that took place in those few hours, however, represented an unprecedented case of meticulously organized mass extermination of millions of victims, the birth of a terrifying idea thought up by the minds of educated people in an ostensibly civilized European country with long traditions.

Enmity is incomparably easier than reconciliation. After all, it happens that we feel almost friendly towards an enemy, being able to shift the responsibility for all our misfortunes to him. […] And reconciliation? How can we live amongst the rubble? How to rid oneself of the memory of wrongs? How can we forget the suffering which filled a victim's entire life? […] Reconciliation requires reflection, moral sensitivity, conscience, great spiritual effort. It requires parting from delusions, from the mythology of hatred and seeing – in the old enemy and in oneself – a person under the same heaven.