Speaker For The Diodes - April 10th, 2010

Apr. 10th, 2010

05:24 am - QotD

"Here is a businessman, friend of mine. And I had a meeting with him, and we couldn't because he went to Poland and he said, two weeks' time. After two days, I got a telephone call from his secretary saying, you can meet Mr. Dit (ph) tomorrow morning. So I came, I said, but you told me that you are away for two weeks. What happened? He said, listen, I went to Poland. I had some business to do there. I touched down in Warsaw, I took a train. It was all snow, and we rode for a couple of hours, and it was the train, of the trains, and the endless snow (INAUDIBLE), so to say. And it all came back to me, and I couldn't stand it anymore. So I simply ran away, came back home.

"I said, wow, what a compelling -- what a compelling experience. I went back home, I wrote it down, because I collected some raw material for my book. And in the morning, I called him, I said, 'Dit, tell me something. Where your parents came from?' He said, from Iraq. I said, 'From Iraq? So what does that mean it all came back to you?' And it is, OK? It happened to us, even though it didn't happen to us, and it happens to us daily.

"Every day we kill and re-kill Hitler. And every day, he kills and re- kills us. And that's it."

-- Avram Burg (b. 1955-01-19), interviewed by Charlie Rose on the PBS television program, Charlie Rose, 2009-04-01 (link includes video and transcript)

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