TOURING EXHIBIT

PROLOGUE, an excerpt, by Cynthia Ozick

"If" is the travail of historians and philosophers, not of the ordinary human article. What we can be sure of without contradiction-we can be sure of it because we are the ordinary human article--is that, difficult as it might be to imagine ourselves among the victims, it is not in us even to begin to think of ourselves as likely murderers. The "banality of evil" is a catchword of our generation; but no, it is an unusual, an exceptional, thing to volunteer for the SS; to force aged Jews to their knees to scrub the gutter with their beards; to empty Zyklon canisters into the hole in the roof of the gas chamber; to enact those thousand atrocities that lead to the obliteration of a people and a culture.

Introduction, an excerpt