There were these - people. Like, a whole nation, only they didn't have a home, for a really long time. And some other people hated them, because they were different, and tried to wipe them out. They - it was really, really awful. They were rounded up, and worked to death, or poisoned, and the bodies were burned because there wasn't space to bury them all. Millions of them. It was the cruelest thing - people mostly agree. The worst thing anyone's ever done, in all of history.

[He doesn't recite it mechanically - as far from it as possible. His words lurch and ache, because it would have been hard to explain the holocaust to someone who'd never heard of it under normal circumstances, but today he has seen it, in the way he sees, all the threads of cause and consequence, has leeched the old suffering from the earth only by taking it into himself, by understanding and bearing witness. He's crying again, silently, tears slipping down his cheeks and soaking the knees of his jeans.]

So. So today someone took me and my friends down to one of the old mass graves. And we climbed in. And they climbed out.