Would you really want to survive in a world if that requires you acts that are inhuman beyond description?
I am not a Jew, but my father, as a polish soldier was on the first train of prisoners to Auschwitz, where he spent years having to photograph many horrors. And my father, after the war, was also able to arrive to Sweden, about or even the same day as Rosenberg’s father… and where he met my mother. And I recently read this book in Swedish, and was equally moved by it.
But for me, the most nerve-wracking part of the book is the description of how in the Polish ghettos a Jewish Council had to wrestle with the decision to elaborate or not, a list with names of thousand of children and grandparents to be delivered to the Nazis, to certain death, in order for some to have a chance to survive. In the Lodz ghetto they did that, and Rosenberg and many other survived. “Would you really want to survive in a world that can require you do that?” is a haunting question that will stay with you.
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