Wit & Attitude Quote by Abraham Pais

The bravado here isn’t heroic so much as unthinkably ordinary: a young Jewish man, marked by a yellow star, getting on a train because he “just wanted to visit some friends.” In Nazi-occupied Holland, that kind of impulse reads like a glitch in the survival software. Pais lets the sentence hang on its own banality, then punctures it with self-diagnosis: “a little bit crazy, a little bit insane.” It’s not melodrama; it’s the stunned recognition that normal human desire (friendship, routine, movement) became indistinguishable from risk-taking under a regime designed to criminalize presence.

The detail that does the real work is the object he “still” has. The star isn’t only a historical symbol; it’s a relic of imposed identity, and keeping it suggests a scientist’s archivist instinct: evidence matters. That small parenthetical becomes a moral footnote to history, resisting the comfort of abstraction. He doesn’t say “during the Holocaust” or “under occupation.” He gives you Utrecht, forty miles, a train. Coordinates, not slogans.

Subtextually, Pais is also describing the mind’s refusal to accept new rules. Totalitarianism depends on people internalizing danger so thoroughly they police themselves. His “Why did I go?” is a quiet rebellion against that internalization - and a confession of how fragile such rebellion is, how easily it can be recoded as “insanity.” The quote lands because it captures the terror of the period without performing it: the catastrophe appears in the gap between an everyday errand and the disproportionate consequences it could trigger.