Sunday 21 November 2010

...of apathy

I never tried to meet Mertens. I felt a complex reluctance, of which aversion was only one component. Years ago I wrote him a letter; I told him that if Hitler had risen to power, devastated Europe and brought Germany to ruin, it was because many good German citizens behaved the way he did, trying not to see and keeping silent about what they did see. Mertens never answered me, and he died a few years later.

[Moments of Reprieve, Levi, P.]

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