The Holocaust is not the worst thing that ever happened in history. It’s worse even than that. It lives in a darkness beyond history. It’s the Marquis de Sade’s philosophy brought to fruition: hell on earth. The Holocaust is beyond art too. It’s the opposite of art, the opposite of Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” the opposite of a world imbued with and understood through the human spirit. Stories of humanity during the event—even true stories like Schindler’s List or The Hiding Place—are so anomalous as to amount to sentimental lies. There was no humanity, and so there can be no true fictions about
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