FROM THE ASHES

Peter Levitt’s powerful and evocative “The Fires Within” (Jan. 9) is a masterpiece. I am probably as stereotypical a WASP as you could imagine, and I was deeply moved by Levitt’s insightful description of his emotions during his trip to the Mauthausen concentration camp. The author helped us all to stand in his shoes, to feel his pain and gain a more compassionate understanding of it.

ROBERT L. MUNGER

Westlake Village

*

The way in which Levitt observed beauty and terror in the same instance has to be one of the most frightening perceptions that we are capable of. For me, it was hearing the old man in the Munich train station say, “Sie haben Judische Augen” (“You have Jewish eyes.”). I was awe-struck in realizing that everyone of his generation had some affiliation with the Nazis. Levitt was able to convey that the ongoing anti-Semitism must stop, as must the violence in our cities, a violence that we must be aware stems from within all of us.

VALERIE FOWLER

Malibu

*

Levitt says that we must grieve for the victims of the Holocaust, and “do all we can to resist the tyranny of hatred and ignorance. . . we must look deeply within ourselves for the causes of such ignorance and its extension into action. . . .”

The Holocaust was not a product of ignorance; it was planned and organized by the German intellectual and professional elite. And it was not simply the result of hatred; it was the result of a cool and deliberate decision to terminate the Jewish people.

The value of human life was negated and denied in Nazi Germany. And the fact that this concept is again present in our own time, in all too many lands, is one of the greatest dangers facing those of us who would like to live in a civilized world.

SOL MODELL

Woodland Hills

*

The intellectual and behavioral problem of the Holocaust is not why it should not have happened but why it did. That little was learned about the nature and practices of racism is all too evident from the history of the last 45 years.

EVELYN STERN

Los Angeles

*

As the daughter of a Nazi Era German, I have seen the looks of undisguised hatred when my mother, a U.S. citizen for 40 years, opens her mouth.

As the wife of an Iranian Muslim, I have been given stony stares when asked the origin of my last name. I listened as a customer berated my brother-in-law, the owner of a gas station, as being another “dirty camel jockey.” I cringed when my bilingual child said he was tired of hearing those “Mexican kids always talking that silly language.”

The forces of prejudice are, along with so many other evil practices, growing at present stronger in the darkness surrounding humanity. Only the recognition of the oneness of mankind will save us.

REBECCA MOTLAGH

Hemet