[At a cemetery, Menachem Daum lifts his Hasidic father out of a car into a wheelchair.]

MENACHEM DAUM: My father, a Holocaust survivor, would quote a Hasidic rebbe who said, "A God who had to limit himself to actions that we humans can understand couldn't possibly be God." Essentially that was his approach to the challenge to faith raised by the Holocaust.

[Daum pushes his father in the wheelchair to a tombstone and begins reading the Hebrew inscription.]

My father's approach differed from that of my mother. On her tombstone we inscribed that she endured much suffering. This was our way of asking God to forgive her sins. In effect, we were saying she has already been punished for her sins in this world.

However, I don't think my mother felt a strong need for God's forgiveness. On the contrary. She told me when she is called in heavenly judgement she will turn the tables. She will demand to know why God stood by silently during the Holocaust as her large family was being destroyed.

[Daum recites psalms at his mother's tombstone to his father.]

Her mother Rachel, the daughter of Yitzhak. Two brothers and six sisters. Her first husband and the son she had before the war named Avrohom.

[Daum points to and reads the names inscribed at the foot of the tombstone. He lights a candle and places pebbles on the stone.]

Just a few months after their liberation, my parents -- Moshe Yosef Daum and Fela Nussbaum -- were married in a displaced persons camp in occupied Germany. They named me Menachem, which means "consoler" or "comforter." Apparently, they hoped that I might restore some happiness in their lives.

Actually, the happiest time in my mothers life, she once told me, had been the years she spent as a student in Beis Yaakov, the network of religious schools for girls in pre-war Poland.

My mother told me she retained the pure faith of a Beis Yaakov girl until she got off the train at Auchswitz. But she never told me what actually happened on the ramp that forever shook her faith. My mother had arrived at the camp with her sister Bluma. Many years later, my aunt Bluma revealed to me that my mother had an infant son in her arms. As they were roused out of the train, a veteran Jewish prisoner hurriedly came up to them. He knew mothers together with their young children would soon be directed to the gas chambers. He urged them to do the unthinkable.

BLUMA NUSSBAUM: (subtitled from Yiddish) "Give up the child. Quickly. We can't stay here too long. We know what we are doing. Give away the child. You are still young trees. You can have more fruit. Because of the child you too will go. Give away the child." A prisoner came from behind us and grabbed the child from Fela's arms. She felt the child being taken from her and said: "The child hasn't eaten, Bluma. Maybe we can still send food to him." I tried to calm her by telling her that today they were taking everyone separately, children, young people. I made excuses but I knew what was happening.

DAUM: At the Passover seder my mother would get annoyed as my father recited the Exodus story. If God did so many miracles during biblical times, then why had she seen no sign of God or his miracles during the holocaust?

[Daum and his father continue to recite psalms.]

My father would wait quietly until she finished. He never offered any theological explanations to defend God. His only response was that we humans, with our limited minds, cannot expect to understand God's ways. We must live with faith despite our unanswered questions.

[Daum wheels his father out of the cemetery.]