The DPs are the surviving remnant of those Jews who, regardless of origin, culture, social position, ideology, class, yes even religion, were condemned to death only because they were Jewish. American and Swiss citizens, heroes of the First World War, the most respected representatives of European culture, manual labourers and bankers, Zionists and Socialists, Orthodox Jews and Catholics, all were collectively stripped of every attribute and, nameless and non-descript, were tortured and killed – as ‘Jew X’. A Jewish tailor from Rhodes who could find no one in the camp to understand him and a Hungarian druggist baptised thirty years before, lay in the same wooden bunk with me, and died because they were Jewish. This is why the surviving remnant feels itself to be the embodiment of the unity of the Jewish experience. This is why they feel themselves prophets of a national rebirth, charged with the task of symbolising this unity and this rebirth, and of being the backbone of its realization. The belief in these extraordinary tasks intensifies the group consciousness of the surviving remnant and makes it see itself as a ‘chosen group’ within the ‘chosen people’.

Hitler was not far from Palestine. There could have been terrible destruction there, but what happened in Poland could not happen in Palestine. They would not have slaughtered us in synagogues. Every boy and every girl would have shot at every German soldier.