The stories that have come out of the Holocaust show that even when mankind was faced with the lowest forms of depravity, when people knew that they would be sent off to die, they still maintained the basic elements of life, the basic requirements of acting in a human manner. The stories show that the people continued to marry, to have children, to raise their children as good Jews, and to act in a manner which is as close as possible to normal under the circumstances and those circumstances were far from normal.

Not all people did this, of course. Not all people rose to act in a human manner but we do see that the strong people, the people who were acting correctly, the brave people, they were the ones who acted in a human manner and we applaud them for doing so and we do not applaud those who were not able to act in this way.

That does not mean that we accuse those who were not able to reach this level of being bad or making any decision about them. It is impossible for us to be able to put ourselves in their position and we cannot condemn them under their circumstances. However, we can point to those who were able to raise themselves to a level of dignity beyond the circumstances and to keep on going.

After all, they could never tell if at the very last minute whether they may have been able to redeemed and whether salvation would have come, whether the war would end and at a certain point the war did end and some people who would have killed were saved at the last minute from being killed. It did happen to some people but obviously it did not happen to others and millions did perish. Some perished maintaining their humanity and others did not maintain this humanity. We can look at them as examples of how we should act ourselves.