Elie Wiesel, the concentration camp survivor and 1986 Nobel laureate, has often spoken and written about the difficulty of translating the events of the Holocaust into words. To do so, he has explained, begins to limit and make objective what can neither be, nor should be, easily defined and comfortably separated from our daily lives as just another grim episode in history that happened long ago and here. The Holocaust was qualitatively different from other human events: The years after it have been darker for humankind than those before it. That it happened continues to affect us all.
Alan C. Nixon's support for the use of data derived from so-called experiments by Nazi scientists (November 14, 1988, page 9) elicited a strong response, as might have been expected. Some of the letters we received are published on this page and the next. It may be true, as Nixon wrote, that ...
