Survival In Auschwitz Quotes

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.

You who live safe In your warm houses, You who find warm food And friendly faces when you return home. Consider if this is a man Who works in mud, Who knows no peace, Who fights for a crust of bread, Who dies by a yes or no. Consider if this is a woman Without hair, without name, Without the strength to remember, Empty are her eyes, cold her womb, Like a frog in winter. Never forget that this has happened. Remember these words. Engrave them in your hearts, When at home or in the street, When lying down, when getting up. Repeat them to your children. Or may your houses be destroyed, May illness strike you down, May your offspring turn their faces from you.

Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent.

you will honor them by staying alive, surviving this place and telling the world what happened here.

No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.

Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.

...for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.

At Auschwitz dying was so easy. Surviving was a full time job.

I never lost sight of what it was to be civilised. I knew that there would be no point surviving if I had to become an evil man to do it.

To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgment.

Did I tell you about Cilka?" "No, Lale, you didn't. Who was Cilka?" "She was the bravest person I ever met. Not the bravest girl, the bravest person.

Everyone affected by war, captivity or aggression reacts differently, and away from it people might try to guess how they would act, or react, in the circumstances, but they do not really know.

His eyes seem to see nothing. He is a man whose soul has died and whose body is waiting to catch up with it.

In my first weeks at Auschwitz I learn the rules of survival. If you can steal a piece of bread from the guards, you are a hero, but if you steal from an inmate, you are disgraced, you die; competition and domination get you nowhere, cooperation is the name of the game; to survive is to transcend your own needs and commit yourself to someone or something outside yourself.

Voi che vivete sicuri Nelle vostre tiepide case, Voi che trovate tornando a sera Il cibo caldo e visi amici: Considerate se questo è un uomo Che lavora nel fango Che non conosce pace Che lotta per mezzo pane Che muore per un sì o per un no. Considerate se questa è una donna, Senza capelli e senza nome Senza più forza di ricordare Vuoti gli occhi e freddo il grembo Come una rana d'inverno. Meditate che questo è stato: Vi comando queste parole. Scolpitele nel vostro cuore Stando in casa andando per via, Coricandovi alzandovi; Ripetetele ai vostri figli. O vi si sfaccia la casa, La malattia vi impedisca, I vostri nati torcano il viso da voi.

But what else could we do but hope? that, after all, is human nature.

My definition of a good book is one that you would read for pleasure despite having no prior interest in the subject. The ostensible subject may be whale hunting, or survival in Auschwitz, or waking up as a cockroach—but you don’t read it because you’re into fisheries or Nazis or entomology: you read it because your life was poorer before you started it, and because now you can’t stop.

We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still posses one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last - the power to refuse our consent.

Sooner or later in life, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unobtainable . . . Our ever-sufficient knowledge of the future opposes it and this is called in the one instance: hope.

The latrine is an oasis of peace.

Qualcuno, molto tempo fa, ha scritto che anche i libri, come gli esseri umani, hanno un loro destino, imprevedibile, diverso da quello che per loro si desiderava e si attendeva.

One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.

…in this place everything is forbidden, not for hidden reasons, but because the camp has been created for that purpose.

For us, on the contrary, the Lager is not a punishment; for us, no end is foreseen and the Lager is nothing but a manner of living assigned to us, without limits of time, in the bosom of the Germanic social organism.

Many people — many nations — can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason.

in our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. What

And that makes her a hero. You’re a hero, too, my darling. That the two of you have chosen to survive is a type of resistance to these Nazi bastards. Choosing to live is an act of defiance, a form of heroism.

forgiveness is not so much for the perpetrator, but for the victim.

So I am saying to you, whoever is reading this book, to remember: never ever give up. You can survive and make your dreams come true.

does not ingenuity consist in the finding or creating of connections between apparently extraneous orders of ideas?)

Every night I had nightmares. I dreamed of rats the size of cats, dead bodies, and needles stuck into me. After we found out that the Nazi's had made soup out of Jewish fat, I dreamed that soap bars spoke to me in the voices of my parents and sisters, asking me, "Why are you washing with us?

That hope never left us, and it sustained us in the years to come, despite the fact that we had no good reason to expect our situation to improve.

It's time to live now, Cilka," he says. "Without fear, and with the miracle of love." "Is that a poem?" she asks him, smiling through her tears. "It is the beginning of one.

Sớm hay muộn trong cuộc đời mình, mỗi người sẽ khám phá ra rằng hạnh phúc hoàn hảo là không có thật nhưng ít ai chịu ngẫm nghĩ về điều ngược lại: rằng một sự bất hạnh hoàn hảo cũng không hề có...

.. . one cannot hope to protect mankind from crimes such as those that were visited upon us unless one struggles to brek the cycle of hatred and voilence that invariable leads to ever more suffering by innocent human beings.

Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.

But she -- she will live. She doesn't know why she has always been sure of that, why she feels she can persist -- keep picking up this needle even though it's as heavy as a brick, keep sewing, keep doing what she has to do -- but she can.

This fills me with anger, although I already know that it is in the normal order of things that the privileged oppress the unprivileged: the social structure of the camp is based on this human law.

It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy.

...In our days many men have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against the bottom, but each for a relatively short period; so that we can perhaps ask ourselves if it is necessary or good to retain any memory of this exceptional human state. To this question we feel that we have to reply in the affirmative. We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing…

All took leave from life in the manner which most suited them. Some praying, some deliberately drunk, others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed their luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundreds other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to die tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?

It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft in the void of bottomless despair, both during the journey and after. It was not the will to live, nor a conscious resignation; for few are the men capable of such resolution, and we were but a common sample of humanity.

when I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated.1 Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.

For example, the great Italian Jewish author Primo Levi, who did survive Auschwitz, said afterwards, “The experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away whatever legacies of my religious education that I had retained. There is Auschwitz, therefore God cannot exist. I haven’t found a solution to that dilemma.

Everything you do leaves something behind; nothing gets lost. All the good you have accomplished will continue in the lives of the people you have touched. It will make a difference to someone, somewhere, sometime, and your achievements will be carried on. Everything is connected like a chain that cannot be broken.’ In

Get up”: the illusory barrier of the warm blankets, the thin armor of sleep, the nightly evasion with its very torments drops to pieces around us, and we find ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to insult, atrociously naked and vulnerable. A

Auschwitz was a living nightmare, a place of unimaginable horrors. But I survived because I owed it to my friend Kurt to survive, to live another day so that I might see him again. Having even just one good friend means that the world takes on new meaning. One good friend can be your entire world. This, more than the food we shared or the warm clothes or the medicine, was the most important thing. The best balm for the soul is friendship. And with that friendship, we could do the impossible.

Nei riguardi dei condannati a morte, la tradizione prescrive un austero cerimoniale, atto a mettere in evidenza come ogni passione e ogni collera siano ormai spente, e come l'atto di giustizia non rappresenti che un triste dovere verso la società, tale da potere accompagnarsi a pietà verso la vittima da parte dello stesso giustiziere. Si evita perciò al condannato ogni cura estranea, gli si concede la solitudine, e, ove lo desideri, ogni conforto spirituale, si procura insomma che egli non senta intorno a sé l'odio o l'arbitrio, ma la necessità e la giustizia, e, insieme con la punizione, il perdono. Ma a noi questo non fu concesso, perché eravamo troppi, e il tempo era poco, e poi, finalmente, di che cosa avremmo dovuto pentirci, e di che cosa venir perdonati?

It seemed that we were condemned to be who we were, which was not a particularly good prospect.

It took strength of character to share and love in a world where selfishness and hate were common currency

One of the consequences of free will is that humans can choose to follow a dark path.

Anger and hate are seeds that germinate war. Forgiveness is a seed for peace. It is the ultimate act of self-healing.

I'd thought you'd given up on me.

Those who seek to protect the body at all cost die many times over. Those who risk the body to survive as men have a good chance to live on.

we become aware, with amazement, that we have forgotten nothing, every memory evoked rises in front of us painfully clear.

If we humans can so easily wash the blood of our fellow humans off our hands, then what hope is there for sparing our future generations from a repeat of the genocides and mass killings of the past?

For human nature is such that grief and pain—even simultaneously suffered—do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of surviving in the camp. And this is the reason why so often in free life one hears it said that man is never content. In fact it is not a question of a human incapacity for a state of absolute happiness, but of an ever-insufficient knowledge of the complex nature of the state of unhappiness; so that the single name of the major cause is given to all its causes, which are composite and set out in an order of urgency. And if the most immediate cause of stress comes to an end, you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a whole series of others.

Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgment of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term “extermination camp,” and it is now clear what we seek to express with the phrase: “to lie on the bottom.

Until that moment I had stopped thinking about my family. Maybe it was due to the bread we ate each evening that supposedly contained not only sawdust but a powder called bromide that made us forget memories of home, a sedative of some kind. Whatever it was or was not, I could not feel sorry for myself, for Miriam, for anyone. I could not think of myself as a victim, or I knew I would perish. It was simple. For me, there was no room for any thought except survival.

El gesto de uno de sus dedos podía provocar la destrucción del campo entero, aniquilar a millares de hombres; mientras la suma de todas nuestras energías y voluntades no habría bastado para prolongar ni un minuto la vida de uno solo de nosotros.

...her father finds being called a Holocaust surviver demeaning. 'When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about gas chambers, Auschwitz -- the Holocaust is not just about that,' she said. 'It's about the little humiliations, the loss of dignity.' Her father made much the same point in the film. 'People talk about Sophie's Choice as if it was a rare event,' he said. 'It wasn't. Everybody had to make Sophie's Choice -- all of us. My mother left behind a four-year-old with the maid. You don't think I was beaten and shot at? There are no violins in my story. It is the most common thing that happened.

Se comprendere è impossibile, conoscere è necessario, perchè ciò che è accaduto può ritornare, le coscienze possono nuovamente essere sedotte ed oscurate: anche le nostre. Per questo, meditare su quanto è avvenuto è un dovere di tutti. Tutti devono sapere, o ricordare, che Hitler e Mussolini, quando parlavano pubblicamente, venivano creduti, applauditi, ammirati, adorati come dei. Erano «capi carismatici», possedevno un segreto potere di seduzione che non procedeva dalla credibilità o dalla giustezza delle cose che dicevano, ma dal modo suggestivo con cui le dicevano, dalla loro eloquenza, dalla loro arte istrionica, forse istintiva, forse pazientemente esercitata e appresa. Le idee che proclamavano non erano sempre le stesse, e in generale erano aberranti, o sciocche, o crudeli; eppure vennero osannati, e seguiti fino alla loro morte da milioni di fedeli.

The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in every fibre of man, it is a property of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and think and talk a lot about its nature. But for us the question is simpler. Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the spring. At the moment we care about nothing else. Behind this aim there is not at the moment any other aim. In the morning while we wait endlessly lined up in roll-call square for the time to leave for work, while every breath of wind penetrates our clothes and runs in violent shivers over our defenceless bodies, and everything is grey around us, and we are grey; in the morning, when it is still dark, we all look at the sky in the east to spot the first signs of a milder season, and the rising of the sun is commented on every day: today a little earlier than yesterday, today a little warmer than yesterday, in two months, in a month, the cold will call a truce and we will have one enemy less. Today the sun rose bright and clear for the first time from the horizon of mud. It is a Polish sun, cold, white, distant, and only warms the skin, but when it dissolved the last mists a murmur ran through our colourless numbers, and when even I felt its lukewarmth through my clothes I understood how men can worship the sun.

Mrs. Goldenthal's twin boys, Alex and Erno, were our age, and I discovered that they had been selected at Auschwitz for Mengele's experiments like us. Mrs. Goldenthan had stayed with them, and I found out later that she had hidden a younger child, Margarita, underneath her long skirt. She had come into the camp with the child hidden in her dress and during her entire stay there, even in the Nazi barracks where she had kept Margarita under the mattress during inspections, she and the other women had helped conceal the child.

È Null Achtzehn. Non si chiama altrimenti che così, Zero Diciotto, le ultime tre cifre del suo numero di matricola: come se ognuno si fosse reso conto che solo un uomo è degno di avere un nome, e che Null Achtzehn non è più un uomo. Credo che lui stesso abbia dimenticato il suo nome, certo si comporta come se così fosse. Quando parla, quando guarda, dà l'impressione di essere vuoto interiormente, nulla più che un involucro, come certe spoglie di insetti che si trovano in riva agli stagni, attaccate con un filo ai sassi, e il vento le scuote.

Tutti scoprono, più o meno presto nella loro vita, che la felicità perfetta non è realizzabile, ma pochi si soffermano invece sulla considerazione opposta: che tale è anche una infelicità perfetta. I momenti che si oppongono alla realizzazione di entrambi i due stati-limite sono della stessa natura: conseguono dalla nostra condizione umana, che è nemica di ogni infinito. Vi si oppone la nostra sempre insufficiente conoscenza del futuro; e questo si chiama, in un caso, speranza, e nell'altro, incertezza del domani. Vi si oppone la sicurezza della morte, che impone un limite a ogni gioia, ma anche a ogni dolore. Vi si oppongono le inevitabili cure materiali, che, come inquinano ogni felicità duratura, cosi distolgono assiduamente la nostra attenzione dalla sventura che ci sovrasta, e ne rendono frammentaria, e perciò sostenibile, la consapevolezza. Sono stati proprio i disagi, le percosse, il freddo, la sete, che ci hanno tenuti a galla sul vuoto di una disperazione senza fondo, durante il viaggio e dopo.

I think if we earn to respect one another in the first place, this will prevent many terrible things from happening. Respecting people does not mean you have to agree with them on everything. But you hear them out and they hear you out. When all respect is lost, then we reach extremes like Nazism.

There are those who might think that this was an act of useless bravery in an extermination camp when there were other, more pressing concerns-- books don't cure illnesses; they can't be used as weapons to defeat an army of executioners; they don't fill your stomach or quench your thirst. It's true: culture isn't necessary for the survival of mankind; for that, you only need bread and water. It's also true that with bread to eat and water to drink, humans survive; but with only this, humanity dies. If human beings aren't deeply moved by beauty, if they don't close their eyes and activate their imaginations, if they aren't capable of asking themselves questions and discerning the limits of their ignorance, then they are men or women, but they are not complete persons.

It’s hard to fathom that something as tangible as shoes could survive when the precious lives they held did not.

The undressing process in Auschwitz not only stripped identity as clothes came off, it also stripped away dignity.

It is fascinating to note how clothing so often played a role in resistance, as life-saving warmth, a heart-warming gift, a hiding place or a disguise.

Nazism could no more be great than a strutting actor in a gilt cardboard crown could be a king.

that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last—the power to refuse our consent.

... son ellos, los hundidos, los cimientos del campo; ellos, la masa anónima, continuamente renovada y siempre idéntica, de no-hombres que marchan y trabajan en silencio, apagada en ellos la llama divina, demasiado vacíos ya para sufrir verdaderamente. Se duda en llamarlos vivos: se duda en llamar muerte a su muerte, ante la que no temen porque están demasiado cansados para comprenderla.

The first lesson any veteran inmate teaches a recent arrival is that you must always be clear about your goal: survival. To survive a few more hours and, in this way, gain another day that, added to other days, might become one more week. You must continue like this, never making big plans, never having big goals, only surviving each moment. To live is a verb that makes sense only in the present tense.

Before 9/11, I thought that tragedy had the potential to connect us with humanity in ways that prosperity does not. I thought that if prosperity tends to isolate, tragedy must connect. Now I realize that this is not always the case. One unfortunate response to tragedy is a self-righteousness about one’s own condition, a seeking proof of one’s special place in the world, even in victimhood. One afternoon, I shared these thoughts with a new colleague, the Israeli vice chancellor of the Budapest-based Central European University. When he told me that he was a survivor of Auschwitz, I asked him what lesson he had drawn from this great crime. He explained that, like all victims of Auschwitz, he, too, had said, “Never again.” In time, though, he had come to realize that this phrase lent itself to two markedly different conclusions: one was that never again should this happen to my people; the other that it should never again happen to any people. Between these two interpretations, I suggest nothing less than our common survival is at stake.

We travelled here in the sealed wagons; we saw our women and our children leave towards nothingness; we, transformed into slaves, have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards to our silent labors, killed in our spirit long before our anonymous death. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz.

I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth saving. The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it, under an offense received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals, the prominents, great and small, down to the indifferent slave Häftlinge, all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically fraternized in a uniform internal desolation. But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.

Those who spent time worrying about what they had lost – their lives, their money, their family – they would not make it. In Auschwitz, there was no past, no future – only survival. We adapted to this strange life in

Se comprendere è impossibile, conoscere è necessario, perché ciò che è accaduto può ritornare, le coscienze possono nuovamente essere sedotte es oscurate: anche le nostre. Per questo, meditare su quanto è avvenuto è un dovere di tutti. Tutti devono sapere, o ricordare, che Hitler e Mussolini, quando parlavano pubblicamente, venivano creduti, applauditi, ammirati, adorati come dei. Erano “capi carismatici”, possedevano un segreto potere di seduzione che non procedeva dalla credibilità o dalla giustezza delle cose che dicevano, ma dal modo suggestivo con cui le dicevano, dalla loro eloquenza, dalla loro arte istrionica, forse istintiva, forse pazientemente esercitata e appresa. Le idee che proclamavano non erano sempre le stesse, e in generale erano aberranti, o sciocche, o crudeli; eppure vennero osannati, e seguiti ino alla loro morte da milioni di fedeli.

When we buried my child, you told me two things that I’ve never forgotten. You said, ‘Life will be good again.’ And you said, ‘If you can survive this, you can survive anything.’ I’ve said those phrases to myself over and over.

This place was confusing and noisy. People were yelling. There were screams. Confusion. Desperation. Barking. Orders. Crying, crying, crying. The crying of children for parents. The crying of parents for their babies. The crying of people confused and bewildered. The crying of people who saw with certainty that their nightmares had come true. All together the cries resounded with the ultimate and most unimaginable pain of human loss, emotional grief and suffering.

But here in the Lager there are no criminals nor madmen; no criminals because there is no moral law to contravene, no madmen because we are wholly devoid of free will, as our every action is, in time and place, the only conceivable one.

Noi sappiamo che in questo difficilmente saremo compresi, ed è bene che cosi sia. Ma consideri ognuno, quanto valore, quanto significato è racchiuso anche nelle più piccole nostre abitudini quotidiane, nei cento oggetti nostri che il più umile mendicante possiede: un fazzoletto, una vecchia lettera, la fotografia di una persona cara. Queste cose sono parte di noi, quasi come membra del nostro corpo; né è pensabile di venirne privati, nel nostro mondo, ché subito ne ritroveremmo altri a sostituire i vecchi, altri oggetti che sono nostri in quanto custodi e suscitatori di memorie nostre. Si immagini ora un uomo a cui, insieme con le persone amate, vengano tolti la sua casa, le sue abitudini, i suoi abiti, tutto infine, letteralmente tutto quanto possiede: sarà un uomo vuoto, ridotto a sofferenza e bisogno, dimentico di dignità e discernimento, poiché accade facilmente, a chi ha perso tutto, di perdere se stesso; tale quindi, che si potrà a cuor leggero decidere della sua vita o morte al di fuori di ogni senso di affinità umana; nel caso più fortunato, in base ad un puro giudizio di utilità. Si comprenderà allora il duplice significato del termine «Campo di annientamento », e sarà chiaro che cosa intendiamo esprimere con questa frase: giacere sul fondo.

È fortuna che oggi non tira vento. Strano, in qualche modo si ha sempre l’impressione di essere fortunati, che una qualche circostanza, magari infinitesima, ci trattenga sull’orlo della disperazione e ci conceda di vivere. Piove, ma non tira vento. Oppure, piove e tira vento: ma sai che stasera tocca a te il supplemento di zuppa, e allora anche oggi trovi la forza di tirar sera. O ancora, pioggia, vento, e la fame consueta, e allora pensi che se proprio dovessi, se proprio non ti sentissi piú altro nel cuore che sofferenza e noia, come a volte succede, che pare veramente di giacere sul fondo; ebbene, anche allora noi pensiamo che se vogliamo, in qualunque momento, possiamo pur sempre andare a toccare il reticolato elettrico, o buttarci sotto i treni in manovra, e allora finirebbe di piovere.

Culture isn’t necessary for the survival of mankind; for that, you only need bread and water. It’s also true that with bread and water to drink, humans survive; but with only this, humanity dies. If human beings aren’t deeply moved by beauty, if they don’t close their eyes and activate their imaginations, if they aren’t capable of asking themselves questions and discerning the limits of their ignorance, then they are men or women, but they are not complete persons: nothing significant distinguishes them then from a salmon or a zebra or a musk ox.

The dehumanizing randomness of the murders suffocated my sense of hope, just as Hitler and his henchmen had intended. What appeared random was, in fact, not random at all. It was a systematic psychological lynching, a strangling of the human heart’s need to believe in the rewards of goodness, a snapping of the moral hinge on which humanity swings. Soon, and much to my shame, I became anesthetized to death, numb to depravity. Some primal survival switch inside me had been temporarily flicked on that allowed me to submerge the emotions generated by the evil scorching my eyes.

At a concluding discussion with one school group on the bus leaving Auschwitz Berkenau, he asks “What has the trip taught you?”, I hated the question, but I was required to ask it. I’ve heard all this (the standard answers) before. I know it by heart. Until one boy says..”I think in order to survive we need to be a little bit Nazi,too.

For people condemned to death, tradition prescribes an austere ceremony, calculated to emphasize that all passions and anger have died down, and that the act of justice represents only a sad duty towards society which moves even the executioner to pity for the victim. Thus the condemned man is shielded from all external cares, he is granted solitude and, should he want it, spiritual comfort; in short, care is taken that he should feel around him neither hatred nor arbitrariness, only necessity and justice, and by means of punishment, pardon. But to us this was not granted, for we were many and time was short. And in any case, what had we to repent, for what crime did we need pardon?

with bread to eat and water to drink, humans survive; but with only this, humanity dies. If human beings aren’t deeply moved by beauty, if they don’t close their eyes and activate their imaginations, if they aren’t capable of asking themselves questions and discerning the limits of their ignorance, then they are men or women, but they are not complete persons:

The thought of suicide was entertained by nearly everyone, if only for a brief time. It was born of the hopelessness of the situation, the constant danger of death looming over us daily and hourly, and the closeness of the deaths suffered by many of the others. From personal convictions which will be mentioned later, I made myself a firm promise, on my first evening in camp, that I would not “run into the wire.” This was a phrase used in camp to describe the most popular method of suicide—touching the electrically charged barbed-wire fence. It was not entirely difficult for me to make this decision. There was little point in committing suicide, since, for the average inmate, life expectation, calculating objectively and counting all likely chances, was very poor. He could not with any assurance expect to be among the small percentage of men who survived all the selections. The prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days—after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide.

Me ne duole, perché dovrò tradurre il suo italiano incerto e il suo discorso piano di buon soldato nel mio linguaggio di uomo incredulo. Ma questo ne era il senso, non dimenticato allora né poi: che appunto perché il Lager è una gran macchina per ridurci a bestie, noi bestie non dobbiamo diventare; che anche in questo luogo si può sopravvivere, e perciò si deve voler sopravvivere, per raccontare, per portare testimonianza; e che per vivere è importante sforzarci di salvare almeno lo scheletro, l'impalcatura, la forma della civiltà. Che siamo schiavi, privi di ogni diritto, esposti a ogni offesa, votati a morte quasi certa, ma che una facoltà ci è rimasta, e dobbiamo difenderla con ogni vigore perché è l'ultima: la facoltà di negare il nostro consenso. Dobbiamo quindi, certamente, lavarci la faccia senza sapone, nell'acqua sporca, e asciugarci nella giacca. Dobbiamo dare il nero alle scarpe, non perché cosi prescrive il regolamento, ma per dignità e per proprietà. Dobbiamo camminare diritti, senza strascicare gli zoccoli, non già in omaggio alla disciplina prussiana, ma per restare vivi, per non cominciare a morire.

In fact, we are the untouchables to the civilians. They think, more or less explicitly—with all the nuances lying between contempt and commiseration—that as we have been condemned to this life of ours, reduced to our condition, we must be tainted by some mysterious, grave sin. They hear us speak in many different languages, which they do not understand and which sound to them as grotesque as animal noises; they see us reduced to ignoble slavery, without hair, without honor and without names, beaten every day, more abject every day, and they never see in our eyes a light of rebellion, or of peace, or of faith. They know us as thieves and untrustworthy, muddy, ragged and starving, and mistaking the effect for the cause, they judge us worthy of our abasement.

The outside world now had proof of industrial-scale murder. Whether the world would or could act on the knowledge remained to be seen. Allied response to the reports was inadequate, on the whole. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill conceded that the persecution of Jews in Hungary ‘is probably the biggest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.’33

Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary--he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived. Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us.

En Auschwitz-Birkenau, los internos aprendieron enseguida que era pocas las pertenencias personales realmente esenciales para vivir: ropa, calzado y un plato para la comida. Más allá de eso, lo que contaba era la amistad y la lealtad. Recuperar las posesiones no tenía tanto que ver con volver a poseerlas como con restablecer cierta vida de hogar tras la realidad distorsionada de los campos de concentración.

En Auschwitz-Birkenau, los internos aprendieron enseguida que eran pocas las pertenencias personales realmente esenciales para vivir: ropa, calzado y un plato para la comida. Más allá de eso, lo que contaba era la amistad y la lealtad. Recuperar las posesiones no tenía tanto que ver con volver a poseerlas como con restablecer cierta vida de hogar tras la realidad distorsionada de los campos de concentración.

Ka-Be is the Lager without the physical discomforts. So that, whoever still has some seeds of conscience, feels his conscience re-awaken; and in the long empty days, one speaks of other things than hunger and work and one begins to consider what they have made us become, how much they have taken away from us, what this life is. In this Ka-Be, an enclosure of relative peace, we have learnt that our personality is fragile, that it is much more in danger than our life; and the old wise ones, instead of warning us 'remember that you must die', would have done much better to remind us of this great danger that threatens us. If from inside the Lager, a message could have seeped out to free men, it would have been this: take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here.

Il Ka-Be è il Lager a meno del disagio fisico. Perciò, chi ancora ha seme di coscienza, vi riprende coscienza; perciò, nelle lunghissime giornate vuote, vi si parla di altro che di fame e di lavoro, e ci accade di considerare che cosa ci hanno fatti diventare, quanto ci è stato tolto, che cosa è questa vita. In questo Ka-Be, parentesi di relativa pace, abbiamo imparato che la nostra personalità è fragile, è molto più in pericolo che non la nostra vita; e i savi antichi, invece di ammonirci «Ricordati che devi morire», meglio avrebbero fatto a ricordarci questo maggior pericolo che ci minaccia. Se dall'interno dei Lager un messaggio avesse potuto trapelare agli uomini liberi, sarebbe stato questo: fate di non subire nelle vostre case ciò che a noi viene inflitto qui. Quando si lavora, si soffre e non si ha tempo di pensare: le nostre case sono meno di un ricordo. Ma qui il tempo è per noi: da cuccetta a cuccetta, nonostante il divieto, ci scambiamo visite, e parliamo e parliamo. La baracca di legno, stipata di umanità dolente, è piena di parole, di ricordi e di un altro dolore. «Heimweh» si chiama in tedesco questo dolore; è una bella parola, vuol dire «dolore della casa». Sappiamo donde veniamo: i ricordi del mondo di fuori popolano i nostri sonni e le nostre veglie, ci accorgiamo con stupore che nulla abbiamo dimenticato, ogni memoria evocata ci sorge davanti dolorosamente nitida. Ma dove andiamo non sappiamo. Potremo forse sopravvivere alle malattie e sfuggire alle scelte, forse anche resistere al lavoro e alla fame che ci consumano: e dopo? Qui, lontani momentaneamente dalle bestemmie e dai colpi, possiamo rientrare in noi stessi e meditare, e allora diventa chiaro che non ritorneremo. Noi abbiamo viaggiato fin qui nei vagoni piombati; noi abbiamo visto partire verso il niente le nostre donne e i nostri bambini; noi fatti schiavi abbiamo marciato cento volte avanti e indietro alla fatica muta, spenti nell'anima prima che dalla morte anonima. Noi non ritorneremo. Nessuno deve uscire di qui, che potrebbe portare al mondo, insieme col segno impresso nella carne, la mala novella di quanto, ad Auschwitz, è bastato animo all'uomo di fare dell'uomo.

That is exactly what I did once, for instance, when a rabbi from Eastern Europe turned to me and told me his story. He had lost his first wife and their six children in the concentration camp of Auschwitz where they were gassed, and now it turned out that his second wife was sterile. I observed that procreation is not the only meaning of life, for then life in itself would become meaningless, and something which in itself is meaningless cannot be rendered meaningful merely by its perpetuation. However, the rabbi evaluated his plight as an orthodox Jew in terms of despair that there was no son of his own who would ever say Kaddish6 for him after his death. But I would not give up. I made a last attempt to help him by inquiring whether he did not hope to see his children again in Heaven. However, my question was followed by an outburst of tears, and now the true reason for his despair came to the fore: he explained that his children, since they died as innocent martyrs,7 were thus found worthy of the highest place in Heaven, but as for himself he could not expect, as an old, sinful man, to be assigned the same place. I did not give up but retorted, “Is it not conceivable, Rabbi, that precisely this was the meaning of your surviving your children: that you may be purified through these years of suffering, so that finally you, too, though not innocent like your children, may become worthy of joining them in Heaven? Is it not written in the Psalms that God preserves all your tears?8 So perhaps none of your sufferings were in vain.” For the first time in many years he found relief from his suffering through the new point of view which I was able to open up to him.