What chills me about these words is the expression of ordinariness, that life went on during the days of the Holocaust as life goes on in the streets of every city every day. I had once thought that the most chilling experience of my life was to put my hand on the floor of the semicircular red brick ovens in Dachau. But as I grow older, I learn each day that that was not the most chilling effect of my visit to Dachau. It was the ordinariness of Dachau. Flowers grow in flower pots that line the road and there's only an ordinary cyclone fence that surrounds that now almost empty field.
Life goes on.
Not we Germans, not we Nazis, we human beings, we did this. We almost destroyed our humanity in doing it. It was terribly difficult for me, and to some this may seem naive, to see the ordinariness of Dachau. It is a painful reminder that life went on as human beings were shoved into ovens and burned. Rabbi Lookstein's book talks about the muted response here in the United States, the muted response all over the world, as though the killing of people was just an ordinary reality of daily life.