7 minutes on Primo Levi

Ourselves or Nothing

Alan Rosen on very early recordings of holocaust testimonies

certfiying the death of Genia Filreis

From the central database of Shoah victims' names, I find this certification--by one of her surviving relatives--of the death of Genia Filreis during the holocaust.

Jerome Rothenberg: the holocaust & why he writes poetry

When Jerome Rothenberg visited Auschwitz, he experienced the keenest sense he had felt to that date that he should be writing poetry.

the killing of the Filreis family

From the Yad Vashem archives in Israel, here are names of some of the Filreis family who were killed by the Germans during World War II. Most of them were exterminated at Treblinka:

Filreiss, Benek
Koldra, Lea, born 1881
Szejnfuks, Manja, born 1907
Akerman, Haya**
Filreis, Genia, born 1915
Filries, Szimon, born 1915
Filries, Max, born 1900
Filries Tauba, born 1895
Filries, Khaia

All were from Warsaw, Poland. I'm guessing that "Filreiss" is a real alternative spelling and that "Filries" is a mistake in transcription at some point (these are just guesses).

The names were submitted by Mrs. Idia Kcefner (I don't know who she is) in 1957, by Mr. Moshe' Koldra (ditto) in 1956, and by Zalman Akerman** in 1999.

For more about Zalman Akerman's story of survival, go here.

** Haya Filreis, married into the Akerman family, was Zalman's mother. Zalman and his mother lived for a time in the Warsaw Ghetto after the mass deportations from the ghetto had begun. Zalman is alive and well and living in Israel, and is the provider of this information, by way of Steve Filreis (my father's cousin Mel's son) and Ayelet Regev (one of Zalman's grandchildren). Ayelet (currently studying law in the U.S.) is my father's father's cousin's son's granddaugther, a closer relation that that phrasing makes it seem.

right blames left (in sum) for the failure of holocaust education

Dated January 3, 2011 - a conservative's view of holocaust education - not very positive. "Genocide Studies has become an academic specialty and a fundraising bonanza, with professional organizations and prizes. Great books have been written and beautiful museums have been built​—​all in the conviction that they will prevent the production of future mass murderers and their willing executioners." But the conviction is hollow. We give students (starting quite young) ideas about preventing genocide but no sense of what to do. Further on you realize that the failure is largely owing to the left, because, in part, they are too much on guard against scholarly and other presentations of the equivalence of Stalin's regime and Hitlers, of communism and fascism. The issue becomes a matter of "minimizers" of communist mass murder. By this point we've come a long way from the quite reasonable concern that educators are teaching their students about the holocaust in the wrong place, the wrong site - the classroom. That's, for me at least, the value of these doubts. I don't know how to get past this very real irony.

an unfinished film

At right: Yael Hersonski.

Pier Marton, whose ideas about film and video I completely trust, has written a blurb-length review of Yael Hersonski's An Unfinished Film, a work I haven't seen (but will soon, somehow) and, based on what I've heard and read so far, want to consider using at the end of my course on representations of the Holocaust. Be sure to re-read the review on Pier's good site. Here's Pier:

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Beyond the Visible: A Vital Film (w. review)

December 28, 2010 at 12:35 pm

Yael Hersonski’s An Unfinished Film
Had posted a trailer back in August, but this film requires much more attention. My short review: One of the sharpest media literacy lesson to be found: the set-up and staging stink… we are indeed all actors in a terrible movie, but it is clear that whatever the word “hell” stands for, these images were conceived through one of the most vicious deceptions ever devised in “that place.” As the indictment reaches us all, the images in all of their obscenity (in the sense of what should be “off stage”) scream for the possibility of an “ethical viewership,” away from our scopophilic universe. An urgent and vital film which like the Holocaust and ALL mass murders cannot be digested. Not to forget, and to do something now before it is, once more, too late. –>A+

Klaus Barbie: "He took pleasure in it."

Simple historical math. This kind of trial (see below) doesn't happen any more. Most perpetrators and many and probably most victims are superannuated or gone. Yet when I watched the Klaus Barbie trial in the late 1980s, I had a ho-hum attitude about it. Read the news stories and took it all mostly for granted. Then the shock--now, going back to it--of reading even the blandest standard newspaper stories about it (bland=he had a smile as thin as a knife blade). In the spirit of being shocked in such a manner, I present the full text of a March 1987 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

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Klaus Barbie: women testify of torture at his hands

Saturday, March 23, 1987 issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer

LYON, France--In 1944, when she was 13, Simone Lagrange testified yesterday, Klaus Barbie gave her a smile as thin as a knife blade, then hit her in the face as he cuddled a cat at the Gestapo headquarters in Lyon.

Lise Lesevre, 86, said Barbie tortured her for nine days in 1944, beating her, nearly drowning her in a bathtub and finally breaking one of her vertebrae with a spiked ball.

Ennat Leger, now 92, said Barbie "had the eyes of a monster. He was savage. My God, he was savage! It was unimaginable. He broke my teeth, he pulled my hair back. He put a bottle in my mouth and pushed it until the lips split from the pressure."

The three women were among seven people who took the witness stand yesterday to testify against Barbie, the former head of the Gestapo in [Paris] during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II.

Barbie, 73, is on trial in Lyon, accused of torturing Jews and members of the French Resistance and deporting them to Nazi death camps.

But he did not hear their testimony because he has refused to attend the courtroom sessions since the second day of the trial, as he may do under French law.

He has, however, denied the accusations against him and has contended that his 1983 extradition from Bolivia to France was illegal.

Several of the seven witnesses yesterday sobbed as they told of arrest, torture, rail convoys to the Drancy collection center near Paris and on to concentration camps.

They depicted Barbie as a harsh, sadistic officer ready to resort to any cruelty to extract information.

Lagrange, her voice breaking, recalled the arrest of her father, mother and herself on June 6, 1944, the day Allied troops landed in Normandy to drive back the Germans.

Denounced by a French neighbor as Jews and Resistance fighters, Lagrange and her parents were taken to Gestapo headquarters where a man, dressed in gray and caressing a cat, said Simone was pretty.

"I was a little girl, and wasn't afraid of him, with his little cat. And he didn't look like the typical tall, blond SS officer we were told to beware of," she said.

The man, whom she identified as Barbie, asked her terrified parents for the addresses of their two younger children.

"When we said we did not know, he pulled my hair, hit me, the first time in my life I was slapped," she said.

During the following week, the man hauled her out of a prison cell each day, beating and punching at her open wounds in an effort to obtain the information.

"He always came with his thin smile like a knife blade," she said. "Then he smashed my face. That lasted seven days."

Later that month, Simone and her mother were put aboard a sealed train for the Auschwitz concentration camp on a horror ride "which turned us into different people" and that still gave her nightmares 40 years later.

From Auschwitz, where her mother was gassed, the inmates were marched to Ravensbruck, where only 2,000 of the 25,000 people who began the march arrived alive. On the way, Simone saw her father marching in another convoy.

"A German officer told me to embrace him. As we were about to meet, they shot him in the head," she said. "It wasn't Barbie who pulled the trigger, but it was him who sent us there."

Ennat Leger, who lost her sight at Ravensbruck after her arrest, was hoisted to the witness stand in her wheelchair by four policemen.

She was a Resistance fighter nearly 50 years old when she was arrested in 1944, she said, and Barbie and his men "were savages, brutal savages, who struck, struck and struck again."

"Have you heard of the Gestapo kitchens?," she quoted him as saying, in an allusion to the torture chambers.

Lise Lesevre, frail and upright despite her 86 years, described the defendant as "Barbie the savage," saying she recognized him decades later because of his "pale eyes, extraordinarily mobile, like those of an animal in a cage."

Lesevre, who belonged to a resistance group, said the Gestapo arrested her on March 13, 1944, while she was carrying a letter intended for a Resistance leader code-named Didier.

She said Barbie spent almost three weeks trying to learn if Lesevre was Didier, and if not, who was. She was interrogated for 19 days, she said, and tortured on nine of them.

First she was hung up by hand cuffs with spikes inside them and beaten with a rubber bar by Barbie and his men. "Who is Didier, where is Didier?" were Barbie's main questions, she said.

Next was the bathtub torture. She said she was ordered to strip naked and get into a tub filled with freezing water. Her legs were tied to a bar across the tub and Barbie yanked a chain attached to the bar to pull her underwater.

"During the bathtub torture, in the presence of Barbie, I wanted to drink to drown myself quickly. But I wasn't able to do it. I didn't say anything.

"After 19 days of interrogation, they put me in a cell. They would carry by the bodies of tortured people. With the point of a boot, Barbie would turn their heads to look at their faces, and if he saw someone he believed to be a Jew, he would crush it with his heel," she said.

"It was a beast, not a man," she said. "It was terror. He took pleasure in it."

During her last interrogation, she said, Barbie ordered her to lie flat on a chair and struck her on the back with a spiked ball attached to a chain. It broke a vertebrae, and she still suffers.

"He told me, 'I admire you, but in the end everybody talks.'" But she never did, and she heard Barbie say finally, "Liquidate her. I don't want to see her anymore."

She was condemned to death by a German military tribunal for "terrorism" but was placed in the wrong cell and deported to Ravensbruck concentration camp, where she survived the war. Her husband and son did not. She said they were both deported to their deaths by Barbie.

Lesevre said she identified Barbie in February in a face-to-face confrontation at St. Joseph Prison, where he is being held.

Kissinger: "...and if they put the Jews into gas chambers..."

Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, came to visit Richard Nixon (and Henry Kissinger) on March 1, 1973. Tapes Nixon's staff made of all his conversations in the Oval Office record Meir offering warm and effusive thanks to Nixon for the way he had treated her and Israel.

Then she left the room, whereupon Nixon and Kissinger dismissed her in brutal terms. Meir had asked that the U.S. put pressure on the Soviet Union to permit Jews to emigrate to Israel to escape persecution. Now I quote:

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

“I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”

Gary Barwin comes to PennSound

Gary Barwin traveled from Hamilton, Ontario, to spend the day at the Writers House the other day. Gary is a poet, fiction writer, composer, and performer, whose many books of poetry include The Porcupinity of the Stars (newly published), Outside the Hat and Raising Eyebrows (all from Coach House), and whose music has been performed by, among other groups, The Vancouver Chamber Choir, The Bach-Elgar Choir, and by the Windtunnel Saxaphone Quartet. Along with Danny Snelson and Ammiel Alcalay, we recorded a session of PoemTalk on a poem by John Wieners. Then I induced Gary into an hour-long recording session for PennSound. And now, already, lo and behold, we have a new Gary Barwin author page at PennSound: here. I had first met Gary at Banff a year ago and enjoyed his company a great deal.

Gary is also the Serif of Nottingblog - which is to say, runs a blog going under that title. He blogs on average once every other day. I recommend it as a digital destination.

Gary is Jewish, and the family's path runs like this: Lithuania, South Africa, Ottawa. His Lithuanian family fled the holocaust. His great-uncle Isaak Grazutis is a holocaust survivor, and also, now, a painter. "In 1941, at the age of eleven, Isaak was forced to flee his native village in advance of Nazi occupation. After his parents were taken away by the invading forces, he was brought to live in an orphanage in Ural, and later, Moscow where he spent his formative years." Here is much more from Gary's blog. At right you see one of Isaak's oil paintings.

106-year-old survivor

A 106-year-old holocaust survivor: video clip. This is the trailer for new documentary short about the oldest Holocaust survivor in the world Alice Herz-Sommer.

British blew up humanitarian flotillas after the Holocaust

"A new book to be published next week entitled MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949, by Keith Jeffery, reveals the existence of Operation Embarrass, a plan to try to prevent Jews getting into Palestine in 1946-'48 using disinformation and propaganda but also explosive devices placed on ships. Nor is this some speculative spy story that can be denied by the authorities: Jeffrey's book is actually, in their own words: 'Published with the permission of The Secret Intelligence Service and the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office.'" Here is a link to the full review/article by Andrew Roberts.

Primo gets a street

Taken today in Paris by Samantha Braun, who admires Levi's writing as much as I do.

neo-Nazi teaches high-school history

Teacher James Keegstra, of Alberta, was teaching in his "history" classes that Jews were historical devils, and their deviltry was no metaphor. This is for real. You've just got to watch this 20-minute video clip from a Canadian 60 Minutes-style TV news magazine. It's called "Lessons in Hate." Note the modest heroism of the two nosey moms. Among Keegstra's claims: "that John Wilkes Booth was of the Jewish religion."

as a way of getting to political poetics

In Praises & Dispraises--a book about political poetry finished not long before his awful and untimely death--Terrence Des Pres began with a remarkable chapter on Antigone. I think I'm going to teach this chapter/essay in my course on the holocaust when I teach it next year. Here is a link to a PDF copy. I've written about Des Pres (my former teacher) here before; click also on the tag below for more.

Anne Frank's fetching tartan plaid fashion cover

The Westport CT Country Playhouse is putting on a production of The Diary of Anne Frank along with a series of events intended to remind theater-goers and neighbors of the details of that genocide. One of the events features Lawrence Langer, whom I admire very much. Here's a blurb from an emailed newsletter:

Concurrent with the production of The Diary of Anne Frank, Westport Country Playhouse presents an unprecedented series of lectures, film-screenings, talkbacks, art exhibits and panel discussions designed to provide a wider context in which to access the life of Anne Frank, the Holocaust, genocide and issues of social justice. Join an important conversation with influential scholars, artists, advocates for human rights, educators, documentarians and eyewitnesses as they shed light on a broad spectrum of fascinating subjects. These programs, the fruit of partnerships with sixteen community organizations, offer something for every interest, and will enhance your understanding and appreciation of one of the most urgent stories of the twentieth century.

But then there's this among the associated events:

Making Diaries: A Family Workshop Based on The Diary of Anne Frank
Friday, October 8
Westport Arts Center
Join Molly Ephraim, the actress who plays Anne Frank, as she recites Anne's powerful words, and then create your own story in a mixed-media diary using a range of innovative art materials.

I'm sure I deserve some flack for being impatient with this, but...come on. Maybe it's the pink tartan snap-closed diary that's setting me off. But really. If there are ways to engage children aged 6 through 12 on the topic of the Holocaust (and I have my doubts, as I've said here in this blog in various ways), making your own "mixed-media diary using a range of innovative materials" is certainly not it. I rather think it's appropriate even for a family-oriented theatrical center to say: In this one instance, we suggest that you leave the children at home. A friend, in pointing out this session, acidly observed: "They get points for trying to shake up the Westport cocktail ice cubes with some Holocaust Awareness this Fall, but check out session with the Anne actress who will help you do your own diary--presumably with the fetching pink tartan plaid fashion cover! Had Anne just had a nice diary cover like this no doubt it would have eased her suffering."

another Filreis survivor of the Holocaust

Zalman was born in Warsaw in 1927 as the only child of Izaak and Haja Akerman. Before marrying Zalman's father, Haja's name as Haja Filreis. I believe that Haja was a sister of my father's father--my grandfather--Ben. That would make Zalman my father's first cousin. Ben and his brother left Warsaw to come to Brooklyn in the 1910s, so the family was permanently split up even before World War II.

He calls himself the only survivor of his family. But now, finally, he knows that other Filreises survived.

Zalman's father Izaak was a hat-maker who specialized mainly in leather hats. His mother Haja--formerly Haja Filreis--was a senior nurse in one of the hospitals of Warsaw. Zalman who was an only child studied at the Polish School on Ptasia Street.

As you will see, if you read on, Zalman is a survivor of the Holocaust. He was involved with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising fairly far into that battle. The rest of his story is told through a web site called "Virtual Stetl," an attempt by some people in Israel to record the memories of Eastern European Jews who eventually found their way to the middle east.

"I had a happy childhood", says Zalman, yet he remembers very little from his childhood days and from his parents. "All what happened before the war was almost entirely erased, except for a few remembrances". For instance, Zalman remembers a colored painting of him when he was four, painted on canvas, which was hanging on the wall in their living room. From the house he remembers the opening sofa in the living room and the round table, which stood in the middle. The cooking stove in the kitchen, which was heated by fire-woods, and the portable stove from cast iron. One of the rooms served as a workshop for his father Izaak, including special models which Izaak sewed his hats on them.

His grandmother (on his mother's side) lived together with their small family and took care of the household and of Zalman, since his mother was working at the hospital.

"I don't remember the face of my mother clearly. What I picture in my mind is her image dressed in the white uniform of a nurse," Zalman sums up his vague memories of that period.

"My Holocaust started when I was 12", relates Zalman. "On September 1st, 1939, the Germans bombed Warsaw. A bomb fell on our house and miraculously we were saved. We were put in a ghetto. One day, during one of the actions, the Germans caught me and I found myself, together with several dozens of other Jews, marching towards the Umschlagplatz - the place from where the Warsaw Jews were sent to extermination camps. We waited for the train inside a large building. When the sign was given, we were ordered to march towards the train, escorted by armed Ukrainian soldiers.

Then one minute I ran away. I hid under a pile of feathers in a garage nearby. When the Germans entered the garage - I held my breath so that no feather would fly.

At night I left my hide-out and returned to the ghetto".

On April 1943, the Jews' uprising in ghetto Warsaw broke out. All the ghetto residents went down to the underground bunkers. Zalman and his mother stayed in one of the largest bunkers in the ghetto, on 22 Franciszkańska Street (his father Izaak was taken away and sent to extermination already in 1942).

On April 20th, the fighters were given an ultimatum to put down their weapons till 10.00 o'clock in the morning. The Waffen SS forces, which arrived at the place faced strong resistance. At that stage, the Germans began setting the ghetto houses on fire. When the fighters fled from the upper burning floors to the underground bunkers, the fire from above took all the supply of oxygen down below and turned the bunkers into suffocation traps. The Germans pumped poisonous gases into the sewage canals and the Jews who had to leave their hide-out were shot dead.

Zalman and his mother were caught and sent by train to one of the extermination camps. Zalman jumped off the train and ran away and since then he never saw his mother who continued her way by train till her bitter end.

Zalman wandered among the villages. He looked for partisans in order to join them and continue fighting the Germans, but he didn't find any and since he was afraid of being handed over to the Germans by the local peasants, he decided to return to Warsaw. He was captured again, and again found himself on a cargo train, this time on the way to Majdanek.

After several months in Majdanek, Zalman was sent to several concentration and forced labor camps. He prefers to avoid the details of those hard experiences he went through in that road of torment and he just sums them up in a few words: "It was very hard !!!"

Zalman was liberated by the American Army in Gedburg, Germany, wherein he arrived with the death march. After his liberation, when Zalman was eighteen he returned to Warsaw, but didn't find any family relative of his. He turned for help to the Jewish Committee in Warsaw, among whom the leaders of the ghetto Warsaw uprising, Izaak Zukerman and Cywia Lubetkin, were active. They sent him to the “Dror” Zionist youth movement. Zalman joined the Kibbutz of the movement (a group of youngsters who were preparing themselves for immigration to Israel and settling down there in a kibbutz). During their training, Zalman was sent to a seminar for youth instructors and for two years he was training children who were Holocaust survivors, most of them were orphans. "That work left in me a deep sense of responsibility towards the children and gave me great satisfaction. That period actually influenced my entire life", says Zalman. On April 1947, he sailed together with a group of 43 children, from Marseille, France to Israel (which was then still Palestine), on board the ship "Theodor Herzel". But when they reached the coasts of the country, the British Mandate authorities prevented their ship from anchoring in Haifa and they were driven away to Cyprus.

They were released at the end of 1947 and left Cyprus and arriving in the land of Israel. The children were sent to Kibbutz Beit Hashita while Zalman volunteered to the Palmach (the military force of the Hagana organization).

In the Independence War of Israel, Zalman enlisted to Battalion 6 of the Harel Brigade, where he served till the Palmach was dismantled and its fighters joined the Israeli Defense Forces.

"After the war ended and I was released from the army, I felt lonely and therefore the Kibbutz way of life seemed ideal for me", tells Zalman, "and choosing to join Kibbutz "Lohamei Hagethaot" seemed only natural. Many members of the "Dror" movement were there, and I knew some of them from the time I was activein the "Bricha" organization.

(The organization was established by the soldiers in the Jewish Brigade and the emissaries of "Aliya Beth" (Hebrew: the second immigration). The "Bricha" operated during '44-'49 to transfer Holocaust survivors from eastern Europe to western Europe and the coast, in order to bring them to Palestine. Survivors of youth movements, partisans and fighters from the ghettos also participated in the "Bricha" activities.)

Zalman continues: "Kibbutz" Lohamei Hagetaot" was founded in 1949, in the Western Galilee, by Holocaust survivors, partisans and fighters from different ghettoes. At the Kibbutz I was instructing immigrant youth".

There at the kibbutz he also met Sheila Feingold, a new immigrant from England. They married on May 3rd, 1953. Their first daughter, Amit, was born in 1956.

In 1959, Zalman and Sheila together with their daughter Amit moved to the youth village of Ben Shemen, where their second daughter Anat was born in 1962. In Ben Shemen he worked as a teacher in the Aliyat Hanoar immigrant youth movement. Sheila started working as an English teacher on Educational Television since it was founded in 1964, and continued working there for the next 32 years.

Zalman decided to complete his education, since he managed to study only six years before the war broke out. Although he was then already married and a father of two, he took his matriculation exams and along the years completed three university degrees in education. His doctorate work for his Ph.D Degree was about Janusz Korczakwho had interested him since he was a child. "Kortchak was my guide along my work in the educational field", he used to say. And so Zalman, who started as an unqualified teacher, ended his role in the educational system as a boarding schools’ inspector on behalf of the Ministry of Education.

Another passion of Zalman was theatre. Already in 1945, in Poland, he directed a theatre play about ghetto Warsaw, in front of an audience of Jewish survivors. In Israel, while he was a school director in the city of Ramle, he founded a puppet theatre. After his retirement Zalman founded a marionette theatre, "Bubonoa", which performed most successfully for six years all over the country and received the recognition of the Ministry of Education.

At the end of the 1990's, Zalman and Sheila moved to a Home for Retired people, called "Migdalei Hajam Hatichon" in Kefar Saba. Zalman received a studio from the house management, where he creates puppets from different materials (some of them are recycled) and also instructs a study group among the house members how to create marionettes. Each year the study group members present an exhibition of their own hand-made marionettes.

Yet Zalman declares, "The main thing in my life was and always remains my family". Indeed, as the only survivor of his family, all alone in the world, Zalman was fortunate to raise a wonderful family. Sheila and Zalman have seven grandchildren. Their eldest daughter Amit has four children: Yuval, Eyal, Razi and Dani. Their second born daughter Anat has three children: Guy, Omer and Ayelet.

must read

In Primo Levi's magnificently modern book, The Periodic Table, the finest of the many fabulous sections is the chapter called "Chromium." Readers of this blog who haven't read "Chromium" should drop everything and read it now. Here's a crude PDF. Good enough. Please read.

medical students should know about Nazi doctors, don't you think?

Thanks to Sam Sharf, vigilant newspaper editor and former student of my course on the holocaust, for making me aware of this announcement:

University of Pennsylvania Students Participate in
Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics
Rachel Hadler, Jin Suk Kim, and Karen Revere
Join Groundbreaking Program for Medical and Law Students

New York, NY — Rachel Hadler, Jim Suk Kim, and Karen Revere, medical students in the class of 2011 at the University of Pennsylvania, are among the 30 students chosen by the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics to participate in its inaugural two week program in New York, Berlin, and Poland for law and medical school students. Fifteen students were chosen from each field. The FASPE programs instruct students on the contemporary ethical issues facing their professions — using the Holocaust and the conduct of their professions in Nazi Germany as a framework for study.

FASPE’s goal is to provide tomorrow’s professional leaders with opportunities to increase their awareness and preparedness for the ethical issues they will confront as professionals. By educating students about the causes of the Holocaust and promoting their awareness of contemporary related issues, FASPE seeks to prevent future collaboration in genocide, racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia by professional and religious leaders.

Ms. Hadler said, “The extent to which the ideal of the nameless, faceless, even irrelevant subject remains in our research is frightening….” Mr. Kim said, “The ethics of medicine are so closely intertwined with humanism. Humanism in medical ethics is what allows us to become the true healers for our patients.” Ms. Revere added, “It is uncomfortable to examine our own research methods against those of the Nazis. …to observe that a slippery slope exists, and to urge that we remain ever-conscious of its dangers.”