But my choice, I think, is Rajchman’s disturbing reflection—offered in passing, but all the more upsetting for that reason—that it was better for him to lose his mother when he was a child than for her to live long enough to descend into the hell she would never have escaped. It is a dismal testament to their destruction of the ordinary moral world that the Nazis could make one of the worst imaginable events of any life seem like it had been a fortunate event.
