Durrenmatt: Barlach: Suspicion

“All it takes to hear this story is a little nerve; less nerve than it did to live through it,” continued the Jew in his old musty caftan in a singing tone. “It’s time to forget all these things, they say, and not just in Germany; there’s cruelty in Russia too, and there are sadists everywhere; but I don’t want to forget anything, and not just because I am a Jew—six million of my people the Germans killed, six million!—; no, it’s because I am still a human being, even though I live in basements and cellars with the rats! I refuse to make a distinction between peoples, I refuse to speak of good and bad nations; but I do have to make one distinction between human beings, this was beaten into me, and from the first blow that cut into my flesh I distinguished between the torturers and the tortured.

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