… is from pages 236-237 of the late Robert Nozick’s splendid 1989 volume, Examined Life (footnote deleted):
The murder of two thirds of European Jewry during the Second World War as part of the determined attempt to annihilate it completely – now known as the Holocaust – is so momentous an event that we cannot yet grasp its full significance. It is difficult enough even to chronicle what occurred – knowledge of much of the suffering and bestial cruelty has disappeared along with its victims – and simply reading the details staggers and numbs the mind: the wanton cruelty of the German perpetrators in continual beatings, the forcible herding of people into synagogues then set on fire to burn them alive there, dousing gasoline on men in prayer shawls and then burning them, dashing children’s brains against walls while their parents were forced to watch, so-called “medical experiments”, machine-gunning people into graves they were forced to dig themselves, ripping beards of of old men, mocking people while inflicting horrors on them, the inexorable and unrelenting organized process that sought to destroy each and every Jew and to degrade them completely in the process, the lies about resettlement in the east in order to maintains some hope and partial cooperation, calling the street from the Treblinka railroad station to the gas chambers through which the Jews were force to walk naked Himmelfahrstrasse, the street to heaven – the list is endless, and it is impossible to find one particular event or a few to encapsulate and symbolize all that happened.