The Chosen

Both Reb Saunders and my father were quite ill on the day in May when word finally came that the war in Europe was over.
...And then, together with the official report of the signing of the unconditional surrender on May 7, there came the news, at first somewhat guarded, then, a few days later, clear and outspoken, of the German concentration camps. My father, recuperating slowly and looking worn and weary, sat in his bed propped on pillows, and read the newspaper stories of the horrors that had occurred in those camps. His face was grim and ashen. he seemed unable to believe what he was reading.
It was while my father read to me an account of what had happened at Teresienstadt, where the Germans had imprisoned and incinerated European Jews of culture and learning, that I saw him break down and weep like a child.
(This passage was taken from Chaim Potok's The Chosen, page 190.)


This passage, talking about the Holocaust stood out to me. It goes on to talk about how weeks after, as more and more information comes in about the concentration camps, how these two pastors (Reb Saunders and Reuven's father) are suffering for their people -- the six million Jews who had been massacred. How they cry with the slightest upsetting, and one of them even has a stroke. It made me think. This occurrence (the death of millions of innocent people) was so disturbing and had never happened before. It affected so many millions of people... just unbelievable. When I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, I was speechless (which seems to be a rare occurrence in itself) and at multiple times almost cried. I walked through hall after hall, where the names of hundreds of thousands of the massacred were imprinted. Just seeing so many names (it would be almost impossible to count them without a machine)... and knowing they were all murdered... left an unexplainable knot in my stomach. There are not words to describe how I felt -- though it was almost as if part of me died.