I had been asked to do a piece, for a magazine, on the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and I asked my wife to come along with me. But she had lost family in the camps, and she was not ready to see the scenes played out in vivid pictures, still and moving. I asked then my friend Alan Greenberg, the architect, to come with me, and as we walked through the museum, he offered his commentary on the building, and his reflections, formed over many years, on the characters and politics brought back again in the tableaux set before us. But then we took a turn, and we suddenly came upon a scene that must have been encountered by many other visitors to the museum: a vast vat filled with shoes. They were the shoes of the victims, collected by the Nazis, as they sought to extract anything they could use again or sell. And what came flashing back instantly, at that moment, were those searing lines of Justice McLean, in his dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott case: You may think that the black man is merely chattel, but “He bears the impress of his Maker, and is amenable to the laws of God and man; and he is destined to an endless existence.” He has, in other words, a soul, which is imperishable; it will not decompose when his material existence comes to an end.