Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), inventor of the concept of "liquid modernity," had a vital resilience of diamond-like solidity. His life was extraordinary. My life in fragments (Paidós in Spanish and Arcadia in Catalan), his biographer Izabela Wagner recovers the author's complete unpublished texts about his childhood and youth in anti-Semitic Poland before the Nazi invasion and in Russia at war with Germany. Today, when hatred of difference has returned to the world stage with crudeness and bravado, Bauman's testimony once again makes perfect sense. What would he think, as a Central European Jew, of what is happening in Ukraine and Gaza? Of Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu? He would certainly stand on the side of freedom and human decency, just as the Talmud says: "A man should always be of the persecuted and not of the persecutors," and it is better "to be cursed than to be the one who curses."