Survivor Famous Quotes

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To die famous is the goal of the immortal. To die young is the goal of the healthy. To die memorably is the goal of the survivor.
Bauvard (Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic)
Ac­cord­ing to the agent, the se­cret to get­ting fa­mous is you just keep say­ing yes.
Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)
Our society needs criminals like Wolfgang Priklopil in order to give a face to the evil that lives within and to split it off from ... It needs the images of cellar dungeons so as not to have to see the many homes in which violence rears its conformist, bourgeois head. Society uses the victims of sensational cases such as mine in order to divest itself of the responsibility for the many nameless victims of daily crimes, victims nobody helps – even when they ask for help.
Natascha Kampusch (3,096 Days)
Let's just day love isn't easy. even when you're the sole survivors of a plane crash and you have the hots for each other.
Rebecca Serle (Famous in Love (Famous in Love, #1))
Waiting or pausing takes enormous skill and practice. However it is a skill that for you has become an essential way of being in the world without being so overwhelmed by it. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, went even further when he famously said, 'Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response likes our growth and our freedom.' Waiting in the Light enables you to create a space for grace.
Christopher Goodchild (Unclouded by Longing)
Her name is Nikki. She’s a recording artist. A famous one. She was in Cambodia setting up a women’s home for survivors of sex trafficking.” I scanned my limited knowledge of current recording artists. “Nikki…Nikki who?” “Her stage name is Lola Simone.
Abby Jimenez (Part of Your World (Part of Your World, #1))
When you get famous, dinner isn’t food anymore; it’s twenty ounces of protein, ten ounces of carbohydrates, salt-free, fat-free, sugar-free fuel. This is a meal every two hours, six times a day. Eating isn’t about eating anymore. It’s about protein assimilation. It’s about cellular rejuvenation cream. Washing is about exfoliation. What used to be breathing is respiration. I’d be the first to congratulate anybody if they could do a better job of faking flawless beauty and delivering vague inspiring messages: Calm down. Everyone, breathe deep. Life is good. Be just and kind. Be the love.
Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)
Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide. (Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?) Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other. In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own. I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel. Is there a tunnel?" he said.
Don DeLillo
[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation. Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up. Survival . . . could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943. Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot.
Blaine Harden (Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West)
Modern life, theorists like Derrida explain, is full of atomized individuals, casting about for a center and questioning the engine of their lives. His writing is famously intricate, full of citations and abstruse terminology. Things are always already happening. But reflecting on his own relationships tended to give his thinking and writing a kind of desperate clarity. The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them. This isn’t meant to be sad. To love friendship, he writes, “one must love the future.” Writing in the wake of his colleague Jean-François Lyotard’s death, Derrida wonders, “How to leave him alone without abandoning him?” Maybe taking seriously the ideas of our departed friends represents the ultimate expression of friendship, signaling the possibility of a eulogy that doesn’t simply focus attention back on the survivor and their grief. We
Hua Hsu (Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner))
A native of the southern United States, the warbler was famous for its unusually lovely song, but its population numbers, never robust, gradually dwindled until by the 1930s the warbler vanished altogether and went unseen for many years. Then, in 1939, by happy coincidence two separate birding enthusiasts, in widely separated locations, came across lone survivors just two days apart. They both shot the birds.
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
The famous Austrian psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl believed that, while we can’t control many things that happen in our lives, we always have the power to control how we feel and what we do about them.
Arnold Schwarzenegger (Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life)
My house was built by a partnership called Desire and Ignorance; they often work together, and always with disastrous consequences. It’s surprising they aren’t more talked of in the press. They are great survivors but incompetent builders. Desire is famous only for pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, while Ignorance casts a veil over all his unexamined assumptions and makes wrong ones every hour. Together, they created the psychological reality where I live. Hardly a surprise, therefore, if it’s unfit for purpose!
Simon Parke (One-Minute Mindfulness: How to Live in the Moment)
Well before she became famous — or infamous, depending on where you cast your vote — Loftus's findings on memory distortion were clearly commodifiable. In the 1970s and 1980s she provided assistance to defense attorneys eager to prove to juries that eyewitness accounts are not the same as camcorders. "I've helped a lot of people," she says. Some of those people: the Hillside Strangler, the Menendez brothers, Oliver North, Ted Bundy. "Ted Bundy?" I ask, when she tells this to me. Loftus laughs. "This was before we knew he was Bundy. He hadn't been accused of murder yet." "How can you be so confident the people you're representing are really innocent?" I ask. She doesn't directly answer. She says, "In court, I go by the evidence.... Outside of court, I'm human and entitled to my human feelings. "What, I wonder are her human feelings about the letter from a child-abuse survivor who wrote, "Let me tell you what false memory syndrome does to people like me, as if you care. It makes us into liars. False memory syndrome is so much more chic than child abuse.... But there are children who tonight while you sleep are being raped, and beaten. These children may never tell because 'no one will believe them.'" "Plenty of "Plenty of people will believe them," says Loftus. Pshaw! She has a raucous laugh and a voice with a bit of wheedle in it. She is strange, I think, a little loose inside. She veers between the professional and the personal with an alarming alacrity," she could easily have been talking about herself.
Lauren Slater (Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century)
Delusions Dissociative disorders, even those created by mind controllers, are not psychosis, but this program will create the most common symptom used to diagnose schizophrenia. The child is hurt while on a turntable, with people and television sets and cartoons and photographs all around the turntable. New alters created by the torture are instructed that they must obey their instructions and become the people around them, people on television, or other alters when they are told to. When this program is triggered, the survivor will hear “voices” of the people whom the "copy alters” are imitating, or will have many confused alters popping out who think they are actually other people or movie stars. The identities of the copy alters change when the survivor's surrounding change.
Alison Miller (Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control)
Winning will make you famous. Losing means certain death. The nation of Panem, formed from a post-apocalyptic North America, is a country that consists of a wealthy Capitol region surrounded by 12 poorer districts. Early in its history, a rebellion led by a 13th district against the Capitol resulted in its destruction and the creation of an annual televised event known as the Hunger Games. In punishment, and as a reminder of the power and grace of the Capitol, each district must yield one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 through a lottery system to participate in the games. The 'tributes' are chosen during the annual Reaping and are forced to fight to the death, leaving only one survivor to claim victory. When 16-year-old Katniss's young sister, Prim, is selected as District 12's female representative, Katniss volunteers to take her place. She and her male counterpart Peeta, are pitted against bigger, stronger representatives, some of whom have trained for this their whole lives. , she sees it as a death sentence. But Katniss has been close to death before. For her, survival is second nature.
Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1))
While so many people floated on the sea, dying, most of the lifeboats did not sit idly by. They had to confront the excruciating moral question of whether to put their own lives at risk and row back to pick up survivors, or whether to preserve their safety at a distance, and either hope that a ship would arrive soon (doubtful, since none appeared to be on the horizon), or let the others die. Most opted for the latter. Famously, Margaret Brown (discussed above) forced her boat to return, but by the time she had taken charge, they were only able to pull a few people from the icy water. The rest had already perished.
Henry Freeman (Titanic: The Story Of The Unsinkable Ship)
The most famous child survivor of the Holocaust in the 1950s was not Anne Frank—after all, she didn’t survive—but a young woman named Hannah Bloch Kohner. NBC television’s This Is Your Life was one of television’s first reality shows, in which host Ralph Edwards surprised a guest, often a celebrity, by reuniting him or her with friends and family members the guest hadn’t heard from in years. The program didn’t shy away from either political controversy or questionable sentimentality, as when guest Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who had survived the atomic bombing of Hirsohima in 1945, was introduced to the copilot of the Enola Gay. On May 27, 1953, This Is Your Life ambushed a beautiful young woman in the audience, escorted her to the stage, and proceeded, in a matter of minutes, to package, sanitize, and trivialize the Holocaust for a national television audience. Hannah Bloch Kohner’s claim to fame was that she had survived Auschwitz before emigrating, marrying, and settling in Los Angeles. She was the first Holocaust survivor to appear on a national television entertainment program. “Looking at you, it’s hard to believe that during seven short years of a still short life, you lived a lifetime of fear, terror, and tragedy,” host Edwards said to Kohner in his singsong baritone. “You look like a young American girl just out of college, not at all like a survivor of Hitler’s cruel purge of German Jews.” He then reunited a stunned Kohner with Eva, a girl with whom she’d spent eight months in Auschwitz, intoning, “You were each given a cake of soap and a towel, weren’t you, Hannah? You were sent to the so-called showers, and even this was a doubtful procedure, because some of the showers had regular water and some had liquid gas, and you never knew which one you were being sent to. You and Eva were fortunate. Others were not so fortunate, including your father and mother, your husband Carl Benjamin. They all lost their lives in Auschwitz.” It was an extraordinary lapse of sympathy, good taste, and historical accuracy—history that, if not common knowledge, had at least been documented on film. It would be hard to explain how Kohner ever made it on This Is Your Life to be the Holocaust’s beautiful poster girl if you didn’t happen to know that her husband—a childhood sweetheart who had emigrated to the United States in 1938—was host Ralph Edwards’s agent. Hannah Bloch’s appearance was a small, if crass, oasis of public recognition for Holocaust survivors—and child survivors especially—in a vast desert of indifference. It would be decades before the media showed them this much interest again.
R.D. Rosen (Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors)
Like my fellow hero Major Whittlesey, I had expected the Great War to be a temporary interruption. I’d settle back into my original orbit once the guns fell silent. Instead, within eight strange and painful months of my famous flight, I was dead. Three years after he and his mutilated band of survivors were freed from the Pocket, Whit was, too. Well prior to our respective deaths, he and I both realized—and suffered considerably from the realization—that after a war there can be no getting back to the original plan.
Kathleen Rooney (Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey)
The Lottery by Stewart Stafford It was New York, 1984, The AIDS tsunami roared in, Friends, old overnight, no more, Breathless, I went for a check-up. A freezing winter's dawn, A solitary figure before me, What we called a drag queen, White heels trembled in the cold. "Hi, are you here to get tested?" Gum chewed, brown eyes stared. This was not my type of person, I turned heel and walked away. At month's end, a crippling flu, The grey testing centre called, Two hundred people ahead of me; A waking nightmare all too real. I gave up and turned to leave, But a familiar voice called out: "Hey, you there, come back!" I stopped and turned around. The drag queen stood there in furs, But sicker, I didn't recognise them, "Stand with me in the line, honey." "Nah, I'm fine, I'll come back again." "Support an old broad before she faints?" A voice no longer frail but pin-sharp. I got in line to impatient murmurs: "If anyone has a problem, see me!" Sylvester on boombox, graveyard choir. My pal's stage name was Carol DaRaunch, (After the Ted Bundy female survivor) Their real name was Ernesto Rodriguez. After seeing the doctor, Carol hugged me, Writing down their number on some paper, With their alias not their real name on it: "Is this the number of where you work?" "THAT is my home number to call me on. THAT'S my autograph, for when I'm famous!" "I was wrong about you, Carol," I said. "Baby, it takes time to get to know me!" A hug, shimmy, the threadbare blonde left. A silent chorus of shuffling dead men walking, Spartan results, a young man's death sentence. Real words faded rehearsal, my eyes watered. Two weeks on, I cautiously phoned up Carol. The receiver was picked up, dragging sounds, Like furniture being moved: "Is Carol there?" "That person is dead." They hung up on me. All my life's harsh judgements, dumped on Carol, Who was I to win life's lottery over a guardian angel? I still keep that old phone number forty years on, Crumpled, faded, portable guilt lives on in my wallet. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.
Stewart Stafford
Irma Grese & Other Infamous SS Female Guards World War 2: A Brief History of the European Theatre World War 2 Pacific Theatre: A Brief History of the Pacific Theatre World War 2 Nazi Germany: The Secrets of Nazi Germany in World War II The Third Reich: The Rise & Fall of Hitler’s Germany in World War 2 World War 2 Soldier Stories: The Untold Stories of the Soldiers on the Battlefields of WWII World War 2 Soldier Stories Part II: More Untold Tales of the Soldiers on the Battlefields of WWII Surviving the Holocaust: The Tales of Survivors and Victims World War 2 Heroes: Medal of Honor Recipients in WWII & Their Heroic Stories of Bravery World War 2 Heroes: WWII UK’s SAS hero Robert Blair “Paddy” Mayne World War 2 Heroes: Jean Moulin & the French Resistance Forces World War 2 Snipers: WWII Famous Snipers & Sniper Battles Revealed World War 2 Spies & Espionage: The Secret Missions of Spies & Espionage in WWII   World War 2 Air Battles: The Famous Air Combat that Defined WWII World War 2 Tank Battles: The Famous Tank Battles that Defined WWII World War 2 Famous Battles: D-Day and the Invasion of Normandy World War 2 Submarine Stores: True Stories from the Underwater Battlegrounds The Holocaust Saviors: True Stories of Rescuers who risked all to Save Holocaust Refugees Irma Grese & The Holocaust: The Secrets of the Blonde Beast of Auschwitz Exposed Auschwitz & the Holocaust: Eyewitness Accounts from Auschwitz Prisoners & Survivors World War 2 Sailor Stories: Tales from Our Warriors at Sea World War 2 Soldier Stories Part III: The Untold Stories of German Soldiers World War 2 Navy SEALs: True Stories from the First Navy SEALs: The Amphibious Scout & Raiders   If these links do not work for whatever reason, you can simply search for these titles on the Amazon website to find them. Instant Access to Free Book Package!   As a thank you for the purchase of this book, I want to offer you some
Ryan Jenkins (World War 2 Air Battles: The Famous Air Combats that Defined WWII)
These qualities are beautifully encapsulated in the famous statement of Victor Frankl, himself a survivor of Auschwitz (and a neurologist and psychologist): “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” MBSR,
Jon Kabat-Zinn (Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness)
They go out to their work, searching for food…. —Job 24:5 (NKJV) My husband, Keith, and I decided to drive down to Tulip Town and wander the fields of vibrant color the Skagit Valley is famous for. Enchanted, we ordered about twenty different varieties for our half-barrel planters. I loved deciding between the American Dream and the Peking Red, the Black Diamond and the Purissima, the Monte Carlo and the Gudoshnik. We planted the bulbs in September, but it was a bad winter. When spring came, I saw only about one-tenth of the tulips we’d planted. Closer inspection revealed squirrels had lived off our bulbs when other food was really scarce. I was upset and complained loudly, angrily, to Keith, but he only said, “The squirrels needed food.” I grumped about that for a while but slowly came to realize that he was right: Providing nourishment should trump surface beauty every time. I came to see the squirrels as survivors and was glad that the tulips had helped them get through the winter. Lord, help me to understand more quickly that being part of the balance of life means I don’t always get to do things my way. —Rhoda Blecker Digging Deeper: Prv 18:17; Ez 34:18
Guideposts (Daily Guideposts 2014)
Her legacy lies not just in the New Deal achievements she brought about, but in the regularly updated codes that protect workers in offices and factories everywhere. Today few people appreciate how different life was before Frances Perkins. We take for granted that children can go to school, not mills or coal mines every day; that people work for eight hours, not fifteen; that they get paid "time and a half" for overtime; that they can receive checks when unemployed or disabled; that they needn't dread the day when they can no longer work. Over seventy million Americans receive benefits under Social Security every month. The figure includes retirees, survivors, dependents, and the disabled. There was only one priority item on her famous wish list she presented to FDR before becoming Secretary of Labor that she and the New Deal were not able to fulfill. It was universal health care. She left us a single major unfilled goal, one we as a nation are still striving to realize.
Ruth Cashin Monsell (Frances Perkins: Champion of American Workers)
With a historian’s eye, Archibald Gracie attempted to separate truth from fantasy as he listened to the survivors’ stories, a potential book beginning to form in his mind. Second Officer Lightoller and Third Officer Pitman regularly stopped by the small cabin Gracie shared with Hugh Woolner to discuss various aspects of the disaster. All agreed that the explosions heard during the sinking could not have been the ship’s boilers blowing up. From the discovery of the severed wreck in 1985 we now know that the “explosions” were actually the sound of the ship being wrenched apart. But Gracie and Lightoller firmly believed that the ship had sunk intact—a view that would become the prevailing opinion for the next seventy-three years. Gracie thought that Norris Williams and Jack Thayer, “the two young men cited as authority … of the break-in-two theory,” had confused the falling funnel for the ship breaking apart. But both Williams and Thayer knew exactly what they had seen, as did some other eyewitnesses. On the Carpathia, Jack Thayer described the stages of the ship’s sinking and breaking apart to Lewis Skidmore, a Brooklyn art teacher, who drew sketches that were later featured in many newspapers. The inaccuracies in Skidmore’s drawings, however, only bolstered the belief that the ship had, in fact, sunk intact. And what of the most famous Titanic legend of all—that the band played “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship neared its end? It’s often claimed that this was a myth that took hold among survivors on the Carpathia and captivated the public in the aftermath of the disaster. None of the musicians survived to confirm or deny the story, but Harold Bride noted that the last tune he heard being played as he left the wireless cabin was “Autumn.” For a time this was believed to be a hymn tune by that name, but Walter Lord proposed in The Night Lives On that Bride must have been referring to “Songe d’Automne,” a popular waltz by Archibald Joyce that is listed in White Star music booklets of the period. Historian George Behe, however, has carefully studied the survivor accounts regarding the music that was heard during the sinking and has found credible evidence that “Nearer My God to Thee” and perhaps other hymns were played toward the end. Behe also recounts that the orchestra’s leader, Wallace Hartley, was once asked by a friend what he would do if he ever found himself on a sinking ship. Hartley replied, “I don’t think I could do better than play ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ ” The legendary hymn may not have been the very last tune played on the Titanic but it seems possible that it was heard on the sloping deck that night.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
At breakfast on Friday morning a crowd of curious hotel guests gathered around Arthur Peuchen in the Waldorf-Astoria’s dining room and made him recount his story once again. In the hotel’s largest ballroom, meanwhile, seven U.S. senators were preparing to question J. Bruce Ismay, the first witness to appear before the U.S. Senate investigation. As he began his testimony that morning, Ismay still seemed shaken by the disaster, and his voice was almost a whisper as he expressed his “sincere grief at this deplorable catastrophe” and offered his full cooperation to the inquiry. Yet his answers were guarded and often prefaced with “I presume” or “I believe” and concluded by “More than that I cannot say”—giving his testimony an air of evasiveness. His claims that he was simply a passenger like any other and that the Titanic was not pushed to its maximum speed were greeted with skepticism by the senators and with open hostility by the press. The Hearst newspapers famously dubbed him J. “Brute” Ismay and ran his photograph framed by those of Titanic widows. Edith Rosenbaum was among the few survivors who thought that the White Star chairman was being made a scapegoat and made a point of telling reporters that it was Ismay who had put her into a lifeboat.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Everyone knows the story of the sinking of the Titanic, which claimed fifteen hundred lives. But almost no one ever mentions a word about the 1948 sinking of the Chinese ferryboat SS Kiangya, which claimed nearly four thousand lives. Or the 1987 sinking of the ferryboat MV Dona Paz, which killed 4,345 people. Or the capsizing of the MV Le Joola, which claimed 1,863 lives off the coast of Gambia in 2002. Perhaps the Titanic sticks out because of its story potential: the famous and wealthy passengers, the firsthand accounts from survivors, and, of course, the eventual blockbuster movie.
Morgan Housel (Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes)
distinctiveness, that I had come on this strange and arduous trip. Killed by the Nazis—yes, but by whom, exactly? The dreadful irony of Auschwitz, I realized as we walked through the famous rooms full of human hair, of artificial limbs, of spectacles, of luggage destined to go nowhere, is that the extent of what it shows you is so gigantic that the corporate and anonymous, the sheer scope of the crime, are constantly, paradoxically asserted at the expense of any sense of individual life. Naturally this is useful, since even now, even while the survivors live and tell their stories to people like me, there are, as we know, those who want to minimize the extent of what happened, even to deny that it happened at all, and when you walk around a place like Auschwitz, wander the enormous, vertiginously broad plain where the barracks once stood, and trudge over the great distance to the place where the crematoria were, and from there to
Daniel Mendelsohn (The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (P.S.))
During World War II pets were allowed aboard British war ships and Blackie was the HMS Prince of Wales's ship's pet cat. . In August 1941 he became famous after the ship carried Prime Minister Winston Churchill across the Atlantic to Canada where he net Franklin D. Roosevelt to agree on the Atlantic Charter. After the declaration of the Charter, as Churchill prepared to depart from the ship, Blackie approached him at the gangway and bid Prime Minister Churchill farewell. In honor of that moment Blackie was renamed Churchill. Later Blackie survived the sinking of Prince of Wales by the Imperial Japanese Naval Air Service later that year, and was rescued and taken to Singapore with the other survivors
Hank Bracker
One rainy day in 1979 or 1980 I was eating lunch at the legendary sandwich shop of Sal Meijer on the Niewmarkt in Amsterdam. In what was once one of the most famous Jewish neighborhoods in Europe, the owner, a Holocaust survivor, stood at the door gazing sadly at the downpour that was keeping his customers away. Speaking to no one in particular, he said, 'Forty days and forty nights. All the wicked people were killed and only the righteous survived. And that is us.' No more than Sal Meijer was Jheronimus Bosch impressed by the descendants of Noah.
Gary Schwartz (Jheronimus Bosch: The Road to Heaven and Hell)
It’s the same lesson that Navy SEAL commandos learn during a modern version of Stanley’s ordeals: the famous Hell Week test of continual running, swimming, crawling, and shivering that they must endure on less than five hours’ sleep. At least three-quarters of the men in each SEAL class typically fail to complete training, and the survivors aren’t necessarily the ones with the most muscles, according to Eric Greitens, a SEAL officer. In recalling the fellow survivors of his Hell Week, he points out their one common quality: “They had the ability to step outside of their own pain, put aside their own fear, and ask: How can I help the guy next to me? They had more than the ‘fist’ of courage and physical strength. They also had a heart large enough to think about others.
Roy F. Baumeister (Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength)
With faulty caps and no artillery present, the Stonewall Brigade fought with knife, bayonet, gun butt, and fist. Those who were able, fled; the remainder were killed.[34] By May 14, 1864, there were less than 200 members of the Stonewall Brigade still in action. These men and survivors from other Virginia brigades were combined to form one small brigade, which was commanded by William Terry as the 4th Virginia.[35] Terry’s Brigade, as it became known simply as a means of designation, fought in various encounters for the remainder of the war, and the men of the former 1st Brigade, Virginia Volunteers, continued to refer to themselves as members of the Stonewall Brigade. After
Charles River Editors (The Stonewall Brigade: The History of the Most Famous Confederate Combat Unit of the Civil War)