A Terrible Beauty

Yom HaShoah. The Jewish day of Holocaust remembrance is soon to be celebrated in my synagogue and others worldwide. Yom HaShoah is a solemn day. Understandably. A day to ponder the evil and how we must never, never let it happen again. Recently, a friend of mine asked me what could be beautiful about the Holocaust. This in response to the fact we had just got done reading from Ecclesiastes 3:17 17 I thought in my heart, "God will bring to judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time for every activity, a time for every deed." and also Ecc 3:11 He hath made every [thing] beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.

The question isn't what can be beautiful about the Holocaust which the instigators and results both of which are evil. The apathy of the people who turned their faces blindly toward Hitler and the Reich and took up the brutal anti-semitism of said Third Reich without thought.
(Luke 23:34Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." ). Oh they knew what their aims and motives were. To destroy the chosen people of God. Did they understand the eternal significance of what they were doing by laying their hands on the Apple of HaShem's eye?
No the Holocaust was not beautiful. What came of it...despite the executions, exterminations, ghettos, starvation, and the rest of the brutality that characterized the dark moments of that time? Well, it is not the Holocaust itself but the survival, faith, courage, and the doing what needed to be done...just to survive. A terrible beauty. An odd phrase no? How can beauty be terrible. Just that it's not that which is terrible that is beautiful it is the wheat separated from the rotten chaff in this case. May we never have to see so terrible a beauty such as that again.
Zachru, Eretz Israel.