Indifference - our mother, our salvation, our destruction

From an interview with Josef Škvorecký:

“Today I’d exclude destruction, and I’m not even sure anymore that indifference is our mother. But it is certainly our saviour.” Why, I asked him, does indifference retain its saving power? “If you were not indifferent, in a certain sense, in the days of Nazism or Communism, you would go mad,” he answered. “Because there were so many victims, you accepted it as a hard fact of life. Nobody weeps reading about six million dead, but if you read the story of one concrete, individual person, you can have a rapport with that person’s suffering. The greatness of literature is that it can move you that way.”