"There is no proportion between the pity we feel and the extent of the pain by which the pity is aroused: a single Anne Frank excites more emotion than the myriads who suffered as she did but whose image has remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is necessary that it can be so. If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live. Perhaps the dreadful gift of pity for the many is granted only to saints; to the
monatti, to the members of the
squadra speciale, and to all of us there remains in the best of cases only the sporadic pity addressed to the single individual, the
Mitmensch, the co-man: the human being of flesh and blood standing before us, within the reach of our providentially myopic senses."
--Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
(
Monatti were the men tasked with collecting and burying the dead during the plagues in medieval Italy;
sqaudra speciale is an Italian term for the
Sonderkommando.)
Coincidentally my father's oldest brother (b. Amsterdam 1929, d. Auschwitz 1942) would have been 80 as well, as of this coming weekend.
Amazing that Miep Gies is still alive, I wasn't aware of that. I don't know that I can think of anyone more admirable than those who willingly accept constant risk of death to themselves over such a long period, for no compensation, in order to protect people they have no particular obligations to.