"In the hearts of millions of Jews there is a sanctuary in which they carry their grief in intimate solitude. Many events in Jewish history are too terrible to be believed, but nothing in Jewish history too terrible to have happened. After the war, the Jews rose from the nightmare to find that it had not been a nightmare after all. It had been a reality. The Jews were fearfully depleted in manpower. There would be 27 million, not 14 million, Jews alive today but for the Holocaust [Population circa 1984; the 2023 number is viewed as ~16 million]. Is it any wonder that Jews have a profound scepticism about the stability of civilization, that they have an obsessive anxiety about their own physical security, that in any appraisal of their destiny they make provision for the worst? And that they remember? They remember not only the crimes of the Nazis but also the apathy and neglect of much of the rest of the world--the governments and churches that passed by on the other side, the nations that closed their gates so that refugees from the Holocaust could not enter."

Heritage: Civilization and the Jews by Abba Eban