The Insanity

clipped from www.msnbc.msn.com It's not hard to guess where all the insanity must ultimately have originated: by looking at a fellow human and seeing an abstraction called "The Jew." That fantasy displaced reality when, in Friedländer's account, a charismatic demagogue met a traditionally anti-Semitic culture that was ripe for an enemy. After that, everything else became thinkable, then doable. Before the sane and the innocent understood what had happened, the real world had disappeared and Zalman Gradowski found himself shoveling out its ashes. All he could do was refuse to avert his eyes.