I - We are about to return to our hotel in Cracovia. In your opinion, what did the holocaust represent for the Jewish people?

PL - Not something new. There had been others. Incidentally, I never liked this term 'holocaust'. It seems to me to be inappropriate, rhetorical, wrong, most of all.

photo: Ari Frankel

PL - It represented a turning point: as a measure, as a way, it was perhaps the first time in which anti-Semitism had been planned by the state, not only condoned or allowed as in the Russia of the Czars. And there was no escape: all of Europe had become a huge trap. It entailed a turning point, not only for European Jews, but also for American Jews, for the Jews of the entire world.