Yehuda Bauer, a lifelong adversary and friend of Hilberg, – he had assisted him in finally getting access to Yad Vashem's archives -who often clashed polemically with the man he considered 'without fault' over what Bauer saw as the latter's failure to deal with the complex dilemmas of Jews caught up in this machinery, recalls often prodding Hilberg on his exclusive focus on the "how" of the Holocaust rather than the "why". According to Bauer, Hilberg "did not ask the big questions for fear that the answers would be too little" or, as Hilberg himself says interviewed in Lanzmann's film, "I have never begun by asking the big questions, because I was always afraid that I would come up with small answers."