Survivors Of Auschwitz Quotes

Here is what I learned. Happiness does not fall from the sky; it is in your hands. Happiness comes from inside yourself and from the people you love. And if you are happy and healthy, you are a millionaire.

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

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.

I am true only as I see and understand myself deep within; I am what I am for myself and in myself, and nothing else.

A friend is someone who reminds you to feel alive.

It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken." I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

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.

If you are lucky enough to have money and a nice house, you can afford to help those who don’t,’ he would tell me. ‘This is what life is all about. To share your good fortune.

With a simple act of kindness, you can save another person from despair, and that might just save their life. And this is the greatest miracle of all.

There are always miracles in the world, even when it seems dark.

There are many things in this world that no amount of money will buy you, and some things priceless beyond measure. Family first, family second, and family at the last.

it was sometimes hard for the good Germans to make themselves known. They had to know that they could trust you. If they were caught helping a Jew, it would mean death for them too. The oppressors were just as afraid as the oppressed. This is fascism – a system that makes victims of everybody.

[F]or me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information. It is also more binding than basic formulas of Jewish existence. If to myself and the world, including the religious and nationally minded Jews, who do not regard me as one of their own, I say: I am a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number.

What is to give light must endure burning"--Victor Frankl, Auschwitz survivor

Here are the lines I try to live by, and which I like to include when I speak publicly: May you always have lots of love to share, Lots of good health to spare, And lots of good friends who care.

Perhaps you do not love your job, or you work with difficult people. You are still doing important things, contributing your own small piece to the world we live in. We must never forget this. Your efforts today will affect people you will never know. It is your choice whether that effect is positive or negative. You can choose every day, every minute, to act in a way that may uplift a stranger, or else drag them down. The choice is easy. And it is yours to make.

How can a race spread out across multiple countries be considered a threat?

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. —VIKTOR FRANKL, Auschwitz survivor and founder of Logotherapy, Man’s Search for Meaning

Where there is life, there is hope. And where there is hope, there is life.

Vivíamos para resistir, y resistíamos para vivir.

On the first day of November last year, sacred to many religious calendars but especially the Celtic, I went for a walk among bare oaks and birch. Nothing much was going on. Scarlet sumac had passed and the bees were dead. The pond had slicked overnight into that shiny and deceptive glaze of delusion, first ice. It made me remember sakes and conjure a vision of myself skimming backward on one foot, the other extended; the arms become wings. Minnesota girls know that this is not a difficult maneuver if one's limber and practices even a little after school before the boys claim the rink for hockey. I think I can still do it - one thinks many foolish things when November's bright sun skips over the entrancing first freeze. A flock of sparrows reels through the air looking more like a flying net than seventy conscious birds, a black veil thrown on the wind. When one sparrow dodges, the whole net swerves, dips: one mind. Am I part of anything like that? Maybe not. The last few years of my life have been characterized by stripping away, one by one, loves and communities that sustain the soul. A young colleague, new to my English department, recently asked me who I hang around with at school. "Nobody," I had to say, feeling briefly ashamed. This solitude is one of the surprises of middle age, especially if one's youth has been rich in love and friendship and children. If you do your job right, children leave home; few communities can stand an individual's most pitiful, amateur truth telling. So the soul must stand in her own meager feathers and learn to fly - or simply take hopeful jumps into the wind. In the Christian calendar, November 1 is the Feast of All Saints, a day honoring not only those who are known and recognized as enlightened souls, but more especially the unknowns, saints who walk beside us unrecognized down the millennia. In Buddhism, we honor the bodhisattvas - saints - who refuse enlightenment and return willingly to the wheel of karma to help other beings. Similarly, in Judaism, anonymous holy men pray the world from its well-merited destruction. We never know who is walking beside us, who is our spiritual teacher. That one - who annoys you so - pretends for a day that he's the one, your personal Obi Wan Kenobi. The first of November is a splendid, subversive holiday. Imagine a hectic procession of revelers - the half-mad bag lady; a mumbling, scarred janitor whose ravaged face made the children turn away; the austere, unsmiling mother superior who seemed with great focus and clarity to do harm; a haunted music teacher, survivor of Auschwitz. I bring them before my mind's eye, these old firends of my soul, awakening to dance their day. Crazy saints; but who knows what was home in the heart? This is the feast of those who tried to take the path, so clumsily that no one knew or notice, the feast, indeed, of most of us. It's an ugly woods, I was saying to myself, padding along a trail where other walkers had broken ground before me. And then I found an extraordinary bouquet. Someone had bound an offering of dry seed pods, yew, lyme grass, red berries, and brown fern and laid it on the path: "nothing special," as Buddhists say, meaning "everything." Gathered to formality, each dry stalk proclaimed a slant, an attitude, infinite shades of neutral. All contemplative acts, silences, poems, honor the world this way. Brought together by the eye of love, a milkweed pod, a twig, allow us to see how things have been all along. A feast of being.

Psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor, Viktor Frankl, stated, "...man is by no means merely a product of heredity and environment. There is a third element: decision. Man ultimately decides for himself!

We must know how to look into images to see that of which they are survivors. So that history, liberated from the pure past (that absolute, that abstraction), might help us to open the present of time.

I also want to say that there is no hierarchy of suffering. There's nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours, no graph on which we can plot the relative importance of one sorrow versus another. People say to me, "Things in my life are pretty hard right now, but I have no right to complain -- it's not Auschwitz." This kind of comparison can lead us to minimize or diminish our own suffering. Being a survivor, being a "thriver" requires absolute acceptance of what was and what is. If we discount our pain, or punish ourselves for feeling lost or isolated or scared about the challenges in our lives, however insignificant these challenges may seem to someone else, then we're still choosing to be victims. We're not seeing our choices. We're judging ourselves.

Frederick Terna, Holocaust survivor and Brooklyn resident: As ashes were falling, I was back in Auschwitz, with ashes coming down. In Auschwitz, I knew what the ashes were. Here, I assumed I knew what the ashes were—it was a building and human remains.

I brought you into this world because I wanted to love you. You owe me nothing but that. All I need from you is your affection and respect.

the greatest thing you will ever do is be loved by another person.

It wasn’t just Nazi soldiers and fascist thugs who turned against us. Ordinary citizens, our friends and neighbours since before I was born, joined in the violence and the looting.

The oppressors were just as afraid as the oppressed. This is fascism – a system that makes victims of everybody.

life can be beautiful if you make it beautiful.

May you always have lots of love to share, Lots of good health to spare, And lots of good friends who care.

Here is what I learned. Happiness does not fall from the sky; it is in your hands. Happiness comes from inside yourself and from the people you love. And if you are healthy and happy, you are a millionaire.

Yet another gratuitous cruelty: the killer targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. It was a phenomenon that the Italian writer Primo Levi identified after emerging from Auschwitz, when he wrote that he and his fellow survivors never wanted to see one another again after the war because they had all done something of which they were ashamed.

You have to try to be happy with what you’ve got. Life is wonderful if you’re happy. Don’t look on the other side of the fence. You will never be happy if you look at your neighbour and make yourself sick with jealousy.

Happiness does not fall from the sky; it is in your hands. Happiness comes from inside yourself and from the people you love. And if you are healthy and happy, you are a millionaire. And happiness is the only thing in the world that doubles each time you share it.

This is the most important thing I have ever learned: the greatest thing you will ever do is be loved by another person. I cannot emphasise this enough, especially to young people. Without friendship, a human being is lost. A friend is someone who reminds you to feel alive.

When I asked 'Have you ever had thoughts of suicide in your post-war life?' none of those I interviewed answered in the affirmative. On the contrary, the response of a survivor of Auschwitz, Jack Saltzman, echoed the sentiments of many: 'I wouldn't give the bastards the satisfaction.

In fact, the question has haunted me for a long time: Does life have meaning after Auschwitz? In a universe cursed because it is guilty, is hope still possible? For a young survivor whose knowledge of life and death surpasses that of his elders, wouldn’t suicide be as great a temptation as love or faith?

For the guards who persecuted us, discipline was more important than common sense. If a soldier is told to march, they will march. If they are told to shoot a man in the back, they will do it, and never question if it is right or wrong. The Germans made a religion of logic, and it turned them into murderers.

Kindness is the greatest wealth of all. Small acts of kindness last longer than a lifetime. This lesson, that kindness and generosity and faith in your fellow man are more important than money, is the first and greatest lesson my father ever taught me. And in this way he will always be with us, and always live forever. Here are the lines I try to live by, and which I like to include when I speak publicly: May you always have lots of love to share, Lots of good health to spare, And lots of good friends who care.

Why argue with the people you love? Go out on the street, stop a person littering and argue with them. There are a million better people to argue with

They had found the courage to reject a life which no longer merited the name.

When the employees of "Canada" or of the "Bekleidungskammer" stole warm clothing for their ragged comrades, that was not common theft; it was an act of social solidarity.

If you are lucky enough to have money and a nice house, you can afford to help those who don’t,’ he would tell me.

Life is wonderful if you’re happy. Don’t look on the other side of the fence. You will never be happy if you look at your neighbour and make yourself sick with jealousy.

And if you are healthy and happy, you are a millionaire.

Having even just one good friend

had learned early in life that we are all part of a larger society and our work is our contribution to a free and safe life for all.

Anger leads to fear, which leads to hate, which leads to death.

Here is what I learned. Happiness does not fall from the sky; it is in your hands. Happiness comes from inside yourself and from the people you love.

is rare that survivors feel at ease enough to admit that they themselves were the ones who were raped.

This is how I found out I was an orphan.

One day we were friends, neighbours, colleagues, and the next we were told we were sworn enemies.

All I need from you is your affection and respect.’ This is what I’m proud of – my family is my achievement.

Having even just one good friend means that the world takes on new meaning. One good friend can be your entire world.

Weakness can be turned into hatred.

They were scared. They were weak. And their weakness allowed them to be manipulated into hatred.

But you cannot work with your hands forever.

A strong partnership is with a man or a woman who is different from you, who challenges you to try new things, to become a better person.

watch out for the German people. With a good leader, they were the greatest nation on Earth. With a bad leader, they were monsters

Under the Nazi regime, a German man was not immediately an evil man, he was weak and easily manipulated.

Happiness does not fall from the sky; it is in your hands. Happiness comes from inside yourself and from the people you love. And if you are healthy and happy, you are a millionaire

I knew that there would be no point surviving if I had to become an evil man to do it. I never hurt another prisoner, I never stole another man’s bread, and I did all I could to help my fellow man.

Do I hate that man? No, I do not hate anyone. He was just weak and probably as scared as I was. He let his fear overtake his morals. And I know that for every cruel person in the world, there is a kind one.

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.

My father used to say to me there is more pleasure in giving than in taking, that the important things in life – friends, family, kindness – are far more precious than money. A man is worth more than his bank account

Auschwitz was the only camp in the entire Nazi system that tattooed its inmates, a practice it had begun in 1941. Those destined for the gas chambers were never registered or tattooed, which worried any who were unmarked.

Auschwitz was about survival, but it would not have been possible to survive without a good friend. Without the kindness and friendship of other people who went out of their way to help me, I would not have lasted a month.

There is a poem in my mother tongue that expresses our feelings: Menschen sterben (people die) Blumen welken (flowers wilt) Eisen und stahl bricht (iron and steel break) Aber unsere frundshaft nicht (but not our friendship)

I always tell my children, ‘I brought you into this world because I wanted to love you. You owe me nothing but that. All I need from you is your affection and respect.’ This is what I’m proud of – my family is my achievement.

I could not help thinking of how we try so hard, with our natural parental instinct, to save our children from pain and suffering, but when we do, we rob them of their ability to grow and learn from adversity. I recalled psychologist and Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger saying that the spoiled, pampered children were the first to die at Auschwitz. They kept waiting for others to come save them, and when no one came, they gave up. They had not learned how to save themselves.

In the preceding pages, to paraphrase the words of Auschwitz survivor, writer, and Nobel Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, we share Martin Small’s personal journey not so that you will understand but so that you will know you can never understand.

you is your affection and respect.’ This is what I’m proud of – my family is my achievement. There is nothing so wonderful as to see your family grow and thrive, and to experience the happiness your children feel as they become parents themselves.

I had learned early in life that we are all part of a larger society and our work is our contribution to a free and safe life for all. If I went to a hospital and saw instruments that I had made and knew that they were being used every day to make life better,

Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of unified Germany, once warned the world to watch out for the German people. With a good leader, they were the greatest nation on Earth. With a bad leader, they were monsters. For the guards who persecuted us, discipline was more important than common sense. If a soldier is told to march, they will march. If they are told to shoot a man in the back, they will do it, and never question if it is right or wrong. The Germans made a religion of logic, and it turned them into murderers.

Do I hate that man? No, I do not hate anyone. He was just weak and probably as scared as I was. He let his fear overtake his morals. And I know that for every cruel person in the world, there is a kind one. I would survive another day with the help of good friends.

I still can’t understand how people with whom I went to work, with whom I studied and played sport, could become animals like that. How was it that Hitler could make enemies of friends, turn civilised men into inhuman zombies? How is it possible to create such hate?

Rudi knew that he was refusing to fit what he called ‘the survivor clichés manufactured for the taste of a certain type of public’: he would offer no uplifting aphorisms, reassuring his audience that, ultimately, human beings were good. He was unforgiving and he was angry.

I have a belief that if you have good morale, if you can hang onto hope, your body can do miraculous things. Tomorrow will come. When you’re dead, you’re dead, but where there is life, there is hope. Why not give hope a chance? It costs you nothing! And, my friend, I lived.

As a matter of fact, the idea of death seeped into our blood. We would die, anyway, whatever happened. We would be gassed, we would be burned, we would be hanged, or we would be shot. The members of the underground at least knew that if they died, they would die fighting for something.

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.

Many from my generation raised their children with the shadow of this hatred and fear. It does your children no good to teach them to be afraid. This is their life! They should celebrate every minute of it. You brought them into this world, you must support them, help them, not push them down with negative thinking. This is an important lesson that we survivors must understand. If you are not free in your heart, don’t take away your children’s freedom. I always tell my children, ‘I brought you into this world because I wanted to love you. You owe me nothing but that. All I need from

I am still in awe of the human body and what it is capable of. I am a precision engineer, and I have spent years making the most complicated, intricate machinery, but I could not make a machine like the human body. It is the best machine ever made. It turns fuel into life, can repair itself, can do anything you need it to. That is why today it breaks my heart to see the way some people treat their bodies, ruining this wonderful machine we are all gifted by smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, poisoning themselves with drugs. They are demolishing the best machine ever put onto this Earth, and it is such a terrible waste.

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.

I try to teach this to every young person I meet. Your mother does everything for you. Let her know you appreciate her, let her know that you love her. Why argue with the people you love? Go out on the street, stop a person littering and argue with them. There are a million better people to argue with than your mum!

this gave me great happiness. The same is true of every job you do. Are you a teacher? You enrich the lives of young people every day! Are you a chef? Each meal you cook brings great pleasure into the world! Perhaps you do not love your job, or you work with difficult people. You are still doing important things, contributing your own small piece to the world we live in. We must never forget this. Your efforts today will affect people you will never know. It is your choice whether that effect is positive or negative. You can choose every day, every minute, to act in a way that may uplift a stranger, or else drag them down. The choice is easy. And it is yours to make.

One internee told me that he had been in their barrack while they waited for the trucks. The children were sitting on the floor, wide-eyed and silent. He asked one lad, “Well, how are you, Janeck?” With a thoughtful expression on his face, the child answered, “Everything is so bad here that it can only be better ‘over there.’ I am not afraid.

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. I never hurt another prisoner, I never stole another man’s bread, and I did all I could to help my fellow man. You see, your food is not enough. There is no medicine for your morals. If your morals are gone, you go.

I am still in awe of the human body and what it is capable of. I am a precision engineer, and I have spent years making the most complicated, intricate machinery, but I could not make a machine like the human body. It is the best machine ever made. It turns fuel into life, can repair itself, can do anything you need it to. That is why today it breaks my heart to see the way some people treat their bodies, ruining this wonderful machine we are all gifted by smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, poisoning themselves with drugs. They are demolishing the best machine ever put onto this Earth, and it is such a terrible waste.” ― Eddie Jaku, The Happiest Man on Earth: The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor

I spoke to a twelve-year-old boy from the Czech camp who was wandering along the barbed wire, looking for something to eat. After speaking to him for a few minutes, I said, “Karli, do you know that you are too clever?” “Yes,” was the reply, “I know that I am very clever. But I know, too, that I shall never have a chance to be more clever. That is what is tragic.

To enrich their racial science, the Germans regularly extracted blood. Apart from the scientific interest, the blood of the internees was used for transfusions to German wounded five hundred cc. of blood were taken from each “voluntary” donor and sent immediately to the army. To save the lives of the Wehrmacht soldiers, the Germans forgot that Jewish blood was “of inferior quality.

It’s important to assign blame to the perpetrators. Nothing is gained if we close our eyes to wrong, if we give someone a pass, if we dismiss accountability. But as my fellow survivors taught me, you can live to avenge the past, or you can live to enrich the present. You can live in the prison of the past, or you can let the past be the springboard that helps you reach the life you want now.

promised when I came out of the darkest hours of my life that I would be happy for the rest of my life and smile, because if you smile, the world smiles with you. Life is not always happiness. Sometimes, there are many hard days. But you must remember that you are lucky to be alive – we are all lucky in this way. Every breath is a gift. Life is beautiful if you let it be. Happiness is in your hands.

So, after you put this book down, please, remember to take time to appreciate every moment of your life – the good, the bad. Sometimes there will be tears. Sometimes there will be laughter. And if you are lucky, there will be friends to share it all with, as I have known throughout my life. Please, every day, remember to be happy, and to make others happy too. Make yourself a friend to the world. Do this for your new friend, Eddie.

For three days, I couldn’t take my eyes off Goering, who lounged in the dock like a bored Roman emperor… As concentration camp survivors testified, I sometimes caught Goering’s cold, unblinking stare, which was full of contempt for the Tribunal and the witnesses. When the prosecution showed films of piled-up corpses at Auschwitz, Goering kept turning his head away, sometimes in my direction. I’m ashamed to say he stared me down, because I’d never before felt myself in the presence of such unmitigated evil.

An extra shift of Sonderkommandos was added. Still it was not enough. At least four hundred Greeks from the Corfu and Athens transport were ordered in the Sonderkommando. Now, something truly unusual happened. These four hundred demonstrated that in spite of the barbed wire and the lash they were not slaves but human beings. With rare dignity, the Greeks refused to kill the Hungarians! They declared that they preferred to die themselves first. Sadly enough, they did. The Germans saw to that. But what a demonstration of courage and character these Greek peasants had given. A pity the world does not know more about them!

Shoot them!’ they cried. ‘Shoot the Jewish dogs!’ What had happened to my German friends that they became murderers? How is it possible to create enemies from friends, to create such hate? Where was the Germany I had been so proud to be a part of, the country where I was born, the country of my ancestors? One day we were friends, neighbours, colleagues, and the next we were told we were sworn enemies. When I think of those Germans relishing our pain, I want to ask them, ‘Have you got a soul? Have you got a heart?’ It was madness, in the true sense of the word – otherwise civilised people lost all ability to tell right from wrong. They committed terrible atrocities, and worse, they enjoyed it. They thought they were doing the right thing. And even those who could not fool themselves that we Jews were the enemy did nothing to stop the mob.

Our difficulty or inability to perceive the experience of others…is all the more pronounced the more distant these experiences are from ours in time, space, or quality,” wrote the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. We can be moved by the tragedy of mass starvation on a far continent; after all, we have all known physical hunger, if only temporarily. But it takes a greater effort of emotional imagination to empathize with the addict. We readily feel for a suffering child, but cannot see the child in the adult who, his soul fragmented and isolated, hustles for survival a few blocks away from where we shop or work. Levi quotes Jean Améry, a Jewish-Austrian philosopher and resistance fighter who fell into the grasp of the Gestapo. “Anyone who was tortured remains tortured… Anyone who has suffered torture never again will be able to be at ease in the world…Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again.” Améry was a full-grown adult when he was traumatized, an accomplished intellectual captured by the foe in the course of a war of liberation. We may then imagine the shock, loss of faith and unfathomable despair of the child who is traumatized not by hated enemies but by loved ones.

Because both Birkenau and Auschwitz are infamous names and a blot on the history of mankind it is necessary to explain how they differed. The railroad separated one from the other. When the selectors told off the deportees on the station platform “Right!” or “Left!” they were sending them to either Birkenau or Auschwitz. Auschwitz was a slave camp. Hard as life was at Auschwitz it was better than Birkenau. For the latter was definitely an extermination camp, and as such was never mentioned in the reports. It was part of the colossal guilt of the German rulers and was rarely referred to, nor was its existence ever admitted until the troops of the liberating Allies exposed the secret to the world. At Auschwitz many war factories were in operation, such as the D.A.W. (Deutsches-Aufrustungswerk), Siemens, and Krupp. All were devoted to the production of armaments. The prisoners detailed to work there were highly privileged compared to those who were not given such employment. But even those who did not work productively were more fortunate than the prisoners in Birkenau. The latter were merely awaiting their turn to be gassed and cremated. The unpleasant job of handling the soon-to-be corpses, and later the ashes, were relegated to groups called “kommandos.” The sole task of the Birkenau personnel was to camouflage the real reason for the camp: extermination. When the internees in Auschwitz, or in other camps in the area, were no longer judged useful they were dispatched to Birkenau to die in the ovens. It was as simple and cold-blooded as that.

That night, atrocities were being committed by civilised Germans all over Leipzig, all over the country. Nearly every Jewish home and business in my city was vandalised, burned or otherwise destroyed, as were our synagogues. As were our people. It wasn’t just Nazi soldiers and fascist thugs who turned against us. Ordinary citizens, our friends and neighbours since before I was born, joined in the violence and the looting. When the mob was done destroying property, they rounded up Jewish people – many of them young children – and threw them into the river that I used to skate on as a child. The ice was thin and the water freezing. Men and women I’d grown up with stood on the riverbanks, spitting and jeering as people struggled. ‘Shoot them!’ they cried. ‘Shoot the Jewish dogs!’ What had happened to my German friends that they became murderers? How is it possible to create enemies from friends, to create such hate? Where was the Germany I had been so proud to be a part of, the country where I was born, the country of my ancestors? One day we were friends, neighbours, colleagues, and the next we were told we were sworn enemies. When I think of those Germans relishing our pain, I want to ask them, ‘Have you got a soul? Have you got a heart?’ It was madness, in the true sense of the word – otherwise civilised people lost all ability to tell right from wrong. They committed terrible atrocities, and worse, they enjoyed it. They thought they were doing the right thing. And even those who could not fool themselves that we Jews were the enemy did nothing to stop the mob. If enough people had stood up then, on Kristallnacht, and said, ‘Enough! What are you doing? What is wrong with you?’ then the course of history would have been different. But they did not. They were scared. They were weak. And their weakness allowed them to be manipulated into hatred. As they loaded me onto a truck to take me away, blood mixing with the tears on my face, I stopped being proud to be German. Never again.