“There is another reason, of a different kind, why I do not despair of …(the) future. The years I have recalled in this book showed …
the depths of evil of which human beings are capable of in their treatment of each other. But the historic record also shows that even in the worst circumstances, not only in battle but in overcrowded prisons and camps, under torture, in the Resistance, and in the face fo certain death, there was a handful-drawn from every nation-who showed to what heights men and women can rise.
In Jerusalem, the Jewish people have created a memorial museum, Yad Vashem, to remind themselves and the rest of the world of the horrors of the Holocaust. It is impossible to go round it and see the evidence they have collected without emerging overwhelmed and crushed. As you come out, however, you enter an avenue of trees known as the Avenue of the Righteous, every tree in which commemorates someone not Jewish who did not stand aside but risked his or her life to help the Jews in their distress.
I have never forgotten the juxtaposition of the Holocaust Museum and those trees. They remain for me, the double image of those years, the unbelievable cruelty AND the courage, the callousness AND the compassion – the human capacity for evil, but also the reassurance of the possibility of human nobility. More than that, they lay upon those of us who have been fortunate enough to survive an obligation not to forget and not to give up in the face of difficulties.”

-The closing paragraphs of “Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives” by Alan Bullock (1993)