The Commanding Voice of Auschwitz

Emil L. Fackenheim

1969

What does the Voice of Auschwitz command?

Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories. They are commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. They are commanded to remember the victims of Auschwitz lest their memory perish. They are forbidden to despair of man and his world, and to escape into either cynicism or…

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Creator Bio

Emil L. Fackenheim

1916–2003
Emil L. Fackenheim was born in Halle, Germany. Arrested in 1938, he escaped the Sachsenhausen labor camp in 1939, and fled to England. He later lived in Canada and Israel. A professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, he addressed Jewish identity, the Holocaust, and German philosophy in his scholarship. Fackenheim was also an ordained Reform rabbi.

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