SOURCE: "Against Comfort," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4805, May 5, 1995, pp. 9-10.

[Bernstein is an Austrian-born Canadian educator and critic. In the following review of Simha "Kazik" Rotem's Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter and Lawrence Langer's Admitting the Holocaust and Art from the Ashes, Bernstein focuses on Langer's criteria for valid responses to the Holocaust.]

In the epilogue to Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter: The past within me, [Rotem's] gripping account of his time as the nineteen-year-old head courier of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) which planned and led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Simha Rotem gives a bitter description of his arrival in Israel in the months just before statehood: "I was interrogated about everyone who had been killed, but I was never asked, even remotely, about those who had survived…. This was why, even after learning Hebrew, I didn't talk very much. I preferred not...