About this episode
It shouldn’t be possible to say such a thing, but I have spent most of my life taking the Holocaust for granted. My father of blessed memory was a child survivor; my mother, she should live a long life, is herself the child of survivors. I have no memory of learning about the Holocaust, no recollection of a parent telling me what it was, of what happened there. It is as if my brain came into the world pre-seared with this knowledge, my father’s screaming nightmares a “normal” part of my childhood, the stories of death and survival, hope and desolation simply the narrative landscape in which I grew up. For me, there has never been a world without the Holocaust. There has consequently never been a time in which I could think about God and my relationship with God in which the unspeakable was not an assumption of the conversation.