The Yad Vashem chapter is easily the heaviest. I hope it's the hardest part to read, but I left the worst parts out of these excerpts. Most of the book is about making a movie, which has its ups and downs, but it's nothing compared to full scale genocide. I spent a day at Yad Vashem the first time I went to Jerusalem. It's the most depressing place I've ever seen, but their overall message is positive. When you're there, it seems like it's about man's inhumanity to man, but it's actually about man's ability to survive. You see death and suffering everywhere you look, but you also see people helping each other out. One of the largest rooms is dedicated to the thousands of people who risked their lives to help out total strangers - and these were mostly strangers of different religions and races, at a time when the world wasn't exactly holding hands and singing about peace and harmony. You asked if it was hard to write about. Absolutely. The Children's Memorial at Yad Vashem is especially heartbreaking. Murdering adults is one thing. Adults hate other adults. You can see that everywhere. But hating children because their background is slightly different from yours is insane. What kind of person can murder a little girl just because her ancestors' book has a few different chapters from their ancestors' book? People like to say that Nazis were monsters. They certainly acted like it. But the scary thing is that they were human beings who voluntarily abandoned their own humanity because their political leaders told them to. People who act without asking questions are more dangerous than monsters. Nazi leaders were evil, certainly, but they were also calculating opportunists who took advantage of a bad economy and a disaffected public. " Join us and we will solve all of your problems." That sounds good. All you have to do is hate those people over there. That's easy enough when you've been told for years that the people over there are the cause of all your problems. Hate is easy to manipulate. This is a book about making a movie, so I wasn't even thinking about such a history lesson when I started. But it's important for the main character to learn about the people around her, and it's even more important that this history is never forgotten. There are a million people who can tell it a million times better than I can, but there are fewer people who were actually there with each passing year. When younger generations ignore what happened, we're all in trouble. "For the dead and the living, we must bear witness." Elie Wiesel
