Daily Inspiration Quote by Aharon Appelfeld

Appelfeld is doing two things at once: insisting on the Holocaust’s irreducible specificity and acknowledging its dangerous portability. Calling it a "central event" keeps it anchored in lived reality - not an abstraction, not a chapter heading, but something that reorganizes a person’s inner life. Then he pivots: it has "become a metaphor for our century". That’s a colder, more ambiguous claim. Metaphor is how culture digests catastrophe, but it’s also how catastrophe gets repurposed, simplified, made to stand in for every modern horror. Appelfeld, a novelist and survivor, knows the seduction and the betrayal embedded in that move.

"There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it" reads less like sanctimony than like an artistic and civic diagnosis. Silence doesn’t equal respect; it equals loss of texture, the fading of names into slogans. The line argues that testimony and art are not optional add-ons to history but part of the machinery that keeps history from becoming myth.

The final sentence narrows the focus to Israel with a startling intimacy: "everyone carries a biography deep inside him". He’s not talking about a country of neat, official narratives; he’s describing a society built from concealed archives - survivors, children of survivors, immigrants carrying old languages, old griefs, old shame. The subtext is that Israeli identity isn’t only ideological or military; it’s psychological, crowded with private stories that never fully surface. In Appelfeld’s hands, biography becomes both burden and proof of life: a reminder that the Holocaust is not finished being lived, only re-encountered.