Gisella Perl Quotes

When we came out of the building, we did not know each other anymore. Instead of the exhausted, tortures, but still self-respecting women who entered through its door, we were a heart-rending lot of crying clowns, a ghastly carnival procession marching toward the last festival: death.

When we entered the first of the filthy rooms inside, we were still human beings, women, wearing our own clothes, our own shoes, our own underwear, and in our hands we still carried the bundle we had brought from home, filled with all that meant so much to us. We still had hair on our heads and most of us even had heads. Above all, we all had our identity, our individuality, which made us different from the other women around us, and our pride, which, as we learned, gets most of its support from outer appearance.

The Nazi method of completely dehumanizing us before throwing us into the fire worked beautifully. Only a very few, the strongest, the cleanest, the noblest were able to retain a semblance of human dignity; the rest were engulfed by the gurgling swamp of crime, mental deterioration, and filth.

One of the basic Nazi aims was to demoralize, humiliate, ruin us, not only physically but also spiritually. They did everything in their power to push us into the bottomless depths of degradation. Their spies were constantly among us to keep them informed about every thought, every feeling, every reaction we had, and one never knew who was one of their agents. There was only one law in Auschwitz - the law of the jungle - the law of self preservation. Women who in their former lives were decent self-respecting human beings now stole, lied, spied, beat the others, and - if necessary - killed them, in order to save their miserable lives. Stealing became an art, virtue, something to be proud of. We called it “organization”. Those who were working near the crematories had an opportunity to “organize” an occasional can of food, a pair of shoes, a dress, a cooking pot, a comb, which they then sold on the black market operating in the latrine for food, for special favors, and - if the buyers were men - for “love”. … Only the strong, the cruel, the merciless survived.

Those evenings at the hospital are the only bearable memory of my Auschwitz days. We were nine friends, nine women of the same cultural and social background, with the same interests, the same enthusiasms, the same ideals. We knew what we were living for and we helped one another in our common fight. When we were hungry, we consoled ourselves by talking literature, quoting passages from the works we loved. When we were tired, when Mengele beat us – to break our spirit – we put our heads together and recited songs of freedom. We did not break… We could not break. We knew that thirty-two thousand helpless women needed us.