Walter Benjamin
The fear that remained in his conscience, not allowed revive her. To interview his wife and their two daughters I found that it was little, very little that they knew everything that is told in two pages of my book; their aches, pains and fears died with him. This experience awoke in me a need to know, know, find myself against different vivid traditions and give form to a book entitled survivor. I included many experiences, incomprehensible, unacceptable and even embarrassing situations for all who belong to the human race. While I wrote it, during the nearly six years that took me to do all the interviews, relived together with his protagonists, with their anecdotes and stories, not only persecution, abuse, hunger. I felt fear to know the coldness with which those henchmen worked. Throw a baby into the air and fired at him, put seven and eight men in Indian row and aiming at the head of one of them to see how many people could kill with a single bullet. Give orders to their dogs so they finished with one person.
Dragging through the streets a man pulled by horses to death. Invade homes at any hour of the day or night with an armed force disproportionate, scandalous, murderous, to take them to the train station and upload them without ammunition in freight trains of animals, no Windows, no chairs, no light, no life chances, to be transferred to their destinations end, the extermination camps. Be aware of what they suffered, feel every moment a pain that cannot be one removed above, knowing things that they cannot nor count, dark details of people who to save his own life did everything that was required, without looking back, sometimes without returning the face to know yours. And why not, also met in special cases, in which many non Jews, risking their lives and those of their own, helped save thousands of Jews. It is here worth mentioning to my good friend not Jewish and now deceased Jorge Planas, who in Council, Frontier City between France and Spain managed to save six thousand Jews, among them we should mention two very special, Salim Jamson and Walter Benjamin, the latter the most important literary critic of the moment.
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