For hundreds of years, they had been used to understanding their own history, rightly or wrongly, as a long story of suffering, much as the prosecutor described it in his opening speech at the trial; but behind this attitude there had been, for a long time, the triumphant conviction of “Am Yisrael Chai,” the people of Israel shall live; individual Jews, whole Jewish families might die in pogroms, whole communities might be wiped out, but the people would survive. They had never been confronted with genocide.
