Survivors Of The Holocaust Quotes

Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.

I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.

It's a disgrace to us all! he almost screamed. 'We're letting them take us to our death like sheep to the slaughter!.....at least we could break out of the ghetto, or at least die honourably, not as a stain on the face of history!

But here God didn't come. We were all on our own.

What I want you to take away from my life story is just how important it is to defend your freedom, at all costs. Experience has shown me that if you lose your freedom, you are condemned to fail.

Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness. 'Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships,' write Judith Herman. 'It cannot occur in isolation.

I came to Australia as a damaged grown up adult, and it took me years to heal, so my perspective of the national Australian pride is not full. It [assimilation] penetrates, it’s accepted, it’s tolerated, and I think the third generation it is absorbed. I don’t know about the second generation, - Holocaust survivor, Kitia Altman

Think about the word destroy. Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That's re-story. Do you know that only two things have been proven to help survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is touching. It sets you free.

Look at me, here I am. Hitler is nothing but ashes.

When arguing that every age has its own Fascism, Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi added that the critical point can be reached “not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned.

It is always a mistake to underestimate how long it takes for mankind to understand the traumas it has suffered, especially the self-inflicted ones.

No white person could possibly understand what it is like to be black in America, even someone like me, a descendant of Holocaust victims and survivors.

Escape was not our goal since it was so unrealistic. What we wanted was to survive, to live long enough to tell the world what had happened in Buchenwald.

Nothing about these times makes any sense. Nothing. Putting it to words only makes it sound too simple.

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.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. —VIKTOR E. FRANKL, Holocaust survivor; author of Man’s Search for Meaning

The only reason for this treatment was that they were Jews.

Holocaust survivors and their descendants are supposed to hate those who oppressed and killed them and their people. Black people are not. This is how anti-blackness works.

Holocaust survivor Corrie Ten Boom said, “If you look at the world, you’ll be distressed. If you look within, you’ll be depressed. But if you look at Christ, you’ll be at rest.

When we are no longer able to change a situation,” psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl observed, “we are challenged to change ourselves.” After

The Nazis understand everything except humour.

As the great psychologist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl writes, “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being…will never be able to throw his life away. He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how.

In Germany, restitution has rightly been paid, and continues to be paid, to survivors of the Holocaust. In America, it was the slaveholders who got restitution, not the people whose lives and wages were stolen from them for twelve generations.

[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.

We tend to be taken aback by the thought that God could be angry. how can a deity who is perfect and loving ever be angry?...We take pride in our tolerance of the excesses of others. So what is God's problem?... But love detests what destroys the beloved. Real love stands against the deception, the lie, the sin that destroys. Nearly a century ago the theologian E.H. Glifford wrote: 'Human love here offers a true analogy: the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor.'... Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference... How can a good God forgive bad people without compromising himself? Does he just play fast and loose with the facts? 'Oh, never mind...boys will be boys'. Try telling that to a survivor of the Cambodian 'killing fields' or to someone who lost an entire family in the Holocaust. No. To be truly good one has to be outraged by evil and implacably hostile to injustice.

There comes a time for us not to just be survivors, but to be warriors. Yara, you have your life, and the chance to make the most of it. Don't run or hide from that challenge or let your guilt keep you from living your life. This gift is such a beautiful opportunity. Embrace it. Seize every opportunity from here on out. Live.

Imagine what it would be like for our descendants to experience the fall of civilization. Imagine failures of reasonableness so total that our largest bombs finally fall upon our largest cities in defense of our religious differences. What would it be like for the unlucky survivors of such a holocaust to look back upon the hurtling career of human stupidity that led them over the precipice? A view from the end of the world would surely find that the six billion of us currently alive did much to pave the way to the Apocalypse.

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

I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.

And for some men, years of swallowed rage, terror, and humiliation concentrated into what Holocaust survivor Jean Améry would call “a seething, purifying thirst for revenge.

He cannot forgive himself for having saved himself when his wife and child went to their deaths we are all as if drugged. Yesterday all of my family were living and now - all are dead. Each of us stands as if turn to stone. I weep for my fate, for what I have left to see.

Even if I wrote on nothing else, it would never be enough, even if all the survivors did nothing but write about their experiences, it would still not be enough. *Response when asked how much longer is he going to write about the Holocaust

Both incest and the Holocaust have been subject to furious denial by perpetrators and other individuals and by highly organised groups such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the Committee for Historical Review. Incest and the Holocaust are vulnerable to this kind of concerted denial because of their unfathomability, the unjustifiability, and the threat they pose to the politics of patriarchy and anti-Semitism respectively. Over and over, survivors of the Holocaust attest that they were warned of what was happening in Poland but could not believe it at the time, could not believe it later as it was happening to them, and still to this day cannot believe what they, at the same time, know to have occurred. For Holocaust deniers this is a felicitous twist, for their arguments denying the Holocaust and therefore the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state capitalize on the discrepancies of faded memory. In the case of incest, although post-traumatic stress disorder, amnesia, and dissociation represent some of the mind's strategies for comprehending the incomprehensible, incest deniers have taken advantage of inconsistencies to discredit survivor testimony.

Too often the survivor is seen by [himself or] herself and others as "nuts," "crazy," or "weird." Unless her responses are understood within the context of trauma. A traumatic stress reaction consists of *natural* emotions and behaviors in response to a catastrophe, its immediate aftermath, or memories of it. These reactions can occur anytime after the trauma, even decades later. The coping strategies that victims use can be understood only within the context of the abuse of a child. The importance of context was made very clear many years ago when I was visiting the home of a Holocaust survivor. The woman's home was within the city limits of a large metropolitan area. Every time a police or ambulance siren sounded, she became terrified and ran and hid in a closet or under the bed. To put yourself in a closet at the sound of a far-off siren is strange behavior indeed—outside of the context of possibly being sent to a death camp. Within that context, it makes perfect sense. Unless we as therapists have a good grasp of the context of trauma, we run the risk of misunderstanding the symptoms our clients present and, hence, responding inappropriately or in damaging ways.

There are two ways to deal with the cold—put on a fur coat to be warm, or light a fire so that others can be warm, too.

You kill yourself when you hate. It's the worst disease in the world.

All suffering is relative to experience, and life while it is everything is also not much at all.

I had never been so grateful for shoveling shit in all my life.

I weep for my fate, for what I have left to see.

Siamo monadi, incapaci di messaggi reciproci, o capaci solo di messaggi monchi, falsi in partenza, fraintesi all'arrivo.

Some people may find bonding with pets easier than with humans because animals are largely indifferent to their owners’ material possessions, social status, well-being, and interpersonal skills.

Every day is a miracle. No matter how bad my circumstances, I have the freedom to choose my attitude to life, even to find joy. Evil is not new. It is up to us how we deal with both good and bad.

I have known many survivors for whom the Holocaust is the central theme of their lives. They have no other. I have tried to live with tolerance and forgiveness as the themes of my life. “God gave us the power to be good or evil. This is our choice. Because some pick evil, we must work together to recognize and stop it. But while we survivors may lead the charge, we cannot do this alone. It must be the goal of all people. “If we will join in this goal, then there is hope for humanity.

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.

I explained to him how, if God has created man with free will, He has to leave a back door open for unbelief despite all His revelations of Himself. For if He showed Himself to us too clearly, He would force us to believe and thus, having given us freedom with one hand, take it away with the other.

Besides, what is pretty, anyway?” she continues. “Eyes? What does the color matter, as long as the ones you love can see themselves shining there? A mouth? Wide or narrow, so long as it speaks the truth.

What is six million?" When you look at the number you see merely a six followed by six zeros. You don't see parents and children. You don't see rabbis, professionals, and workers. You don't see teachers and eager students. You don't see communal and cultural institutions which took hundreds of years to develop. "Six million" is just too anonymous a term to convey what was really lost during the Holocaust.

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and the author of Man's Search for Meaning, wrote that human beings create meaning in three ways: thought their work, though their relationships, and by how they choose to meet unavoidable suffering. Every life brings hardship and trial, and every life also offers deep possibilities for meaningful work and love... I've learned that courage and compassion are two sides of the same coin.

To take a specific example, a researcher in the Journal of Traumatic Stress interviewed 129 women with documented histories of child sexual abuse that occurred between the ages of 10 months and 12 years. Of those, 38 percent had forgotten the abuse. Of the remaining women who remembered, 16 percent reported that they had for a period of time forgotten but subsequently recovered their memories. [46] Thus, during that time a "false negative" recorded for those women. These are the sort of distinctions for which Elaine Showalter in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media fails to account.

I become almost wild and shout at them: - To whom are you reciting Kaddish? Do you still believe? And what do you believe, whom are you thinking? Are you thanking the Lord for his mercy and taking away our brothers and sisters, our fathers and mothers? No, no! It is not true; there is no God. If there were a God, he would not allow such misfortune, such transgression, where innocent small children, only just born, or killed, by people who want only to to honest work and make themselves useful to the world are killed! and you, living witnesses of the great misfortune, remain thankful. Whom are you thanking?

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.

Many producers state without blinking that the audience wants a happy ending. They say this because up-ending films tend to make more money than down-ending films. The reason for this is that a small percentage of the audience won't go to any film that might give it an unpleasant experience. Generally their excuse is that they have enough tragedy in their lives. But if we were to look closely, we'd discover that they not only avoid negative emotions in movies, they avoid them in life. Such people think that happiness means never suffering, so they never feel anything deeply. The depth of our joy is in direct proportion to what we've suffered. Holocaust survivors, for example, don't avoid dark films. They go because such stories resonate with their past and are deeply cathartic.

One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate. I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.

I "salvati" del Lager non erano i migliori, i predestinati del bene, i latori di un messaggio: quanto io avevo visto e vissuto dimostrava l'esatto contrario. Sopravvivevano di preferenza i peggiori, gli egoisti, i violenti, gli insensibili, i collaboratori della "zona grigia",le spie. Non era una regola certa (non c'erano, nè ci sono nelle cose umane, regole certe), ma pure sempre una regola. Mi sentivo sì innocente, ma intruppato fra i salvati, e perciò alla ricerca permanente di una giustificazione.

All were expecting to die, and every day of their life was a day of suffering and torment. All had witnessed terrible crimes, and the Germans would have spared none of them; the gas chambers awaited them. Most, in fact, were sent to the gas chambers after only a few days of work, and were replaced by people from new contingents. Only a few dozen people lived for weeks and months, rather than for days and hours; these were skilled workers, carpenters and stonemasons, and the bakers, tailors and barbers who ministered to the Germans' everyday needs. These people created an Organizing Committee for an uprising. It was of course, only the already-condemned, only people possessed by an all-consuming hatred and a fierce thirst for revenge, who could have conceived such an insane plan. They did not want to escape until they had destroyed Treblinka. And they destroyed it.

When we are no longer able to change a situation,” psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl observed, “we are challenged to change ourselves.

The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was the primary tool used by FDR to keep Jewish refugees from reaching US shores.

When women are educated, the world is a better place.

But how did you convince people to come out of hiding when hiding was all they had known?

I thought those were others. Soon, I was to learn that they were us.

Aware that hatred eats the soul of the hater rather than the hated, Alice reasons, “I am still grateful for life. Life is a present.

The six men set off for Amberg, twenty miles away, where there was a convalescent hospital.

Prejudice is nothing but ignorance, jealousy, pettiness”—she

From one end to the other I have identified with various forms of spirituality. I was a Jew, then a God-hater. I was an atheist, then a Christian, for which I was called a traitor.

I have seen that man’s capacity for evil has no limit, just as man’s genius is not limited to reaching new heights in every human endeavor.

Anyone who grew up with Holocaust survivors knows what they had to overcome to tell their stories. For decades after the war they treated their experiences as shameful secrets. On top of the ignominy of victimhood, the desperate straits to which they were reduced could remove the last traces of their humanity in ways they could be forgiven for wanting to forget.

Twenty years ago, when she first started doing Survivor Day, it was easy, she says, but now, who’s left? Maybe you survive cancer, maybe you survive the Holocaust, but life’ll get you every time.

Never forget” is the collective plea of Holocaust survivors. And in the first few decades after WW2 ended, it really did seem as if humanity would always remember, and perhaps even learn from, the Nazi genocide so that future atrocities may be prevented. Unfortunately, the historicity of the Holocaust has been undermined and chipped away at by the exact same sinister forces that created the genocide in the first place: racists, religious bigots and the most paranoid type of conspiracy theorists who, together, are uniting – often unwittingly – to form a new wave of anti-Semitism that will not willingly accept the obvious facts of the past. This chipping away (at the truth) began slowly and insidiously – much like the Holocaust itself – but sadly, and worryingly, it is gathering pace.

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're healthy and happy you are a millionaire.

Within a decade or two, all Holocaust survivors will likely have passed away so a ticking clock is in effect in this battle between the truth and lies. Keep in mind even those survivors born in a concentration camp during WW2 would be at least 71 years-of-age when this book (the one you are reading now) was released. Those survivors old enough to clearly recall the events of that nightmare will, of course, be older and have much less time left. As the memory of the Holocaust begins to fade away, it will become easier to deny the genocide even occurred unless those of us who are truthseekers are able to embrace the memory of the genocide and educate others do the same. What’s needed in this propaganda war is for the true stories of Holocaust survivors – as well as those of the Nazi perpetrators, their associates and others who witnessed the genocide – to be told loudly and clearly so that there will never, ever be room for doubt in generations to come. After all, nothing is more powerful, credible or damning than eyewitness accounts.

life is very short, and keeping grievances takes so much energy, it’s not worth it. If you don’t make something positive for yourself at least, what you have is wasted, gone, and you can’t get it back. One thing

Finally, and even more seriously, I fear a return to the international climate that prevailed in the 1920s and '30s, when the United States withdrew from the global stage and countries everywhere pursued what they perceived to be their own interests without regard to larger and more enduring goals. When arguing that every age has its own Fascism, the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi added that the critical point can be reached “not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned.” If he is right (and I think he is), we have reason to be concerned by the gathering array of political and social currents buffeting us today—currents propelled by the dark underside of the technological revolution, the corroding effects of power, the American president’s disrespect for truth, and the widening acceptance of dehumanizing insults, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism as being within the bounds of normal public debate. We are not there yet, but these feel like signposts on the road back to an era when Fascism found nourishment and individual tragedies were multiplied millions-fold.

Survivor I’m twenty-four Led to slaughter I survived. These words are empty and equivalent: man and animal love and hate foe and friend dark and light. Man is killed just like an animal I’ve seen: truckloads of chopped-up people who will never be saved. Concepts are only words: virtue and vice truth and lie beauty and ugliness courage and cowardice. Virtue and vice weigh the same I’ve seen: a man who was both vicious and virtuous. I’m searching for a teacher and a master let him give me back my sight hearing and speech let him name objects and concepts again let him separate the light from the dark. I’m twenty-four Led to slaughter I survived.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” —VIKTOR FRANKL, author, neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor

One Holocaust survivor was often told by friends, “I cannot believe in a God who allows such things to happen.” Her response was simply, “That is the only God there is.” Poignantly, we either open our hearts to this God for companionship in surviving, learning from, healing from, and preventing such catastrophes in the future, or we succumb to the devastating illusion that we are utterly alone with disastrous and pointless outcomes of our own and others’ agency. Even

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.

Having God is having someone to rage against,” she said over coffee. “Where else will I go with that? God is strong enough to take it, like a strong parent. My railing is not only against God, but also against man. Where was God? Where was man?

I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen long ago! from We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust

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.

Marvel and DC comics dealt with fantastical characters but at least they sent them on recognisable journeys, providing them with origin stories, personal tragedies (the villain Magneto was revealed to be a Holocaust survivor), love affairs, psychological issues, political awakenings and all the rest of it.

Let me tell you,” the nun went on, “everyone is equal under God! Prejudice is nothing but ignorance, jealousy, pettiness”—she shook the hose with each word, sending undulating arcs of water into the flower beds—“and intolerance is responsible for all the violence! It’s drilled into children from the beginning.

I want to remember my past To see before my eyes The image of my parents The house in which I grew up The village in which my family lived for generations I don't want to remember my past I fear for what my memory Might bring before my eyes I wonder whether I can continue my life If I'll rescue from oblivion What I want to recall.

And so the picture that I showed her that Sunday, a picture I'd seen countless times since I was a boy, brought home to me for the first time the strangeness of my relationship to the people I was interviewing, people who were rich in memories but poor in keepsakes, whereas I was so rich in the keepsakes but had no memories to go with them.

social power is power over—the capacity to control others’ states and behaviors. Personal power is power to—the ability to control our own states and behaviors. This is the kind of power Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel was referring to when he wrote, “Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.” Ideally, we want both kinds of power, but, as Wiesel suggests, personal power—the state of being in command of our most precious and authentic inner resources—is uniquely essential. Unless and until we feel personally powerful, we cannot achieve presence, and all the social power in the world won’t compensate for its absence.

There’s a Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough at Last,” about a book-lover desperate for more time so he can do nothing but read. He gets his wish; he’s the lone survivor of a global nuclear holocaust and ends up at a library with a lifetime’s worth of intact books. He’s excitedly sorting through them when his glasses fall off and shatter, leaving him unable to read.

Bruno Bettelheim, who might have had more influence if he weren’t, as Dr. Spock himself noted, a “[v]ery frightening” figure who “scared the hell out of people.” A Holocaust survivor with a heavy accent, a stern manner, and some outlandish ideas, Bettelheim gave people the creeps, and after his suicide in 1990, we’d learn there was good reason: his credentials were faked,

Each year, Flore and I celebrate our wedding anniversary on 20 April - Hitler's birthday. We are still here; Hitler is down there. Sometimes, when we are sitting in the evening in front of the television with a cup of tea and a biscuit, I think, aren't we lucky? In my mind, this is really the best revenge, and it is the only revenge I'm interested in - to be the happiest man on earth.

Each year, Flore entice celebrate our wedding anniversary on 20 April - Hitler's birthday. We are still here; Hitler is down there. Sometimes, when we are sitting in the evening in front of the television with a cup of tea and a biscuit, I think, aren't we lucky? In my mind, this is really the best revenge, and it is the only revenge I'm interested in - to be the happiest man on earth.

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.

To deny the reported six million (approximately) Jews who died, or the 11 million people in total, is to ignore all the eyewitness accounts from Holocaust survivors, the non-Jewish witnesses of the millions who died the open-air massacres around Europe, the concentration camp guards, Nazi officers who admitted to gassings and other related crimes immediately after WW2, and the universal agreement of all mainstream historians who have studied this historical event inside out – not to mention every single scientist who has ever analyzed forensic evidence retrieved from the Nazi genocide. Not even the most corrupt courtroom on Earth could ignore this much evidence – for collectively these confirmations of the Holocaust equate to irrefutable proof that the reported death toll is indeed correct. It is possibly the most well-documented crime of the 20th Century, but remember for religious extremists, Nazi apologists or other anti-Semites it would never matter how much evidence you put in front of them. They would always deny the Holocaust because to admit the event occurred would be to stop believing the Jews are inferior to them. It would also require such bigots to admit the very uncomfortable truth to themselves: that their ‘own kind’ did these despicable things to the Jewish people.

No small part in the new awareness of the horrors of genocide was a willingness of Holocaust survivors to tell their stories. Chalk and Jonassohn note that these memoirs are historically unusual.146 Survivors of earlier genocides had treated them as humiliating defeats and felt that talking about them would only rub in history’s harsh verdict. With the new humanitarian sensibilities, genocides became crimes against humanity, and survivors were witnesses for the prosecution.

But I can't help thinking about the graves I saw on this summer's trip, and the millions of people in them, and the millions more without graves. The ones who are smoke. And I find that I can feel it, at last. Or that I've always felt it, without knowing what it was: the Holocaust, roaring down the generations like a wave of radiation, eradicating, in everyone it touches, the ability to trust people, experience joy; fall in love, believe in love when you see it in others. ("Dancing Men")

My china boy seemed to embody the way no story reaches us without having its heels chipped off or its face scratched away. And how lacunae and gaps are the constant companions of survival, its hidden engine, fueling its acceleration. How only trauma makes individuals — singly and unambiguously us — from the mass product. And yes, finally, the way in which I am the little boy, the product of mass manufacturing and also of the collective catastrophe of the last century, the survivor and unwitting beneficiary, here by some miracle.

Me da vergüenza reconocerlo, pero compartí la adquisición únicamente con el rabino. Lo cortamos todo en trocitos que escondimos en los bolsillos, bajo las esteras y donde pudimos, y los comimos migaja a migaja, con excepción de lo que se llevaron las ratas que abundaban en el campo. A diferencia del mundo de afuera, donde los seres humanos vivían en sociedad y morían en soledad, allí moríamos colectivamente, pero cada uno sobrevivía por su cuenta. Es tremendo reconocer que lo mismo era válido tanto para la gente como para las ratas.

This was a particularly spectacular example of the German campaign to gather forced labor in the East, which had begun with the Poles of the General Government, and spread to Ukraine before reaching this bloody climax in Belarus. By the end of the war, some eight million foreigners from the East, most of them Slavs, were working in the Reich. It was a rather perverse result, even by the standards of Nazi racism: German men went abroad and killed millions of "subhumans," only to import millions of other "subhumans" to do the work in Germany that the German men would have been doing themselves - had they not been abroad killing "subhumans." The net effect, setting aside the mass killing abroad, was that Germany became more of a Slavic land than it had ever been in history. (The perversity would reach its extreme in the first months of 1945, when surviving Jews were sent to labor camps in Germany itself. Having killed 5.4 million Jews as racial enemies, the Germans then brought Jewish survivors home to do the work that the killers might have been doing themselves had they not been abroad killing.) pp. 244-246

Bearing witness takes the courage to realize the potential of the human spirit. Witnessing requires us to call forth the highest qualities of our species, qualities such as conviction, integrity, empathy, and compassion. It is easier by far to retain the attributes of carnistic culture: apathy, complacency, self-interest, and "blissful" ignorance. I wrote this book––itself an act of witnessing––because I believe that, as humans, we have a fundamental desire to strive to become our best selves. I believe that each and every one of us has the capacity to act as powerful witnesses in a world very much in need. I have had the opportunity to interact with thousands of individuals through my work as a teacher, author, and speaker, and through my personal life. I have witnessed, again and again, the courage and compassion of the so-called average American: previously apathetic students who become impassioned activists; lifelong carnists who weep openly when exposed to images of animal cruelty, never again to eat meat; butchers who suddenly connect meat to its living source and become unable to continue killing animals; and a community of carnists who aid a runaway cow in her flight from slaughter. Ultimately, bearing witness requires the courage to take sides. In the face of mass violence, we will inevitably fall into a role: victim or perpetrator. Judith Herman argues that all bystanders are forced to take a side, by their action or inaction, and that their is no such thing as moral neutrality. Indeed, as Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel points out, "Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." Witnessing enables us to choose our role rather than having one assigned to us. And although those of us who choose to stand with the victim may suffer, as Herman says, "There can be no greater honor.

Another eminent psychologist, Dr. Aaron Antonovsky, an Israeli medical sociologist, has also attempted to pin down the key psychological traits that allowed some to withstand extreme stress while others did not. He focused on Holocaust survivors and narrowed the search down to three traits that together add to having a sense of coherence: comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness. So “hardy” people have a belief that their situation has inherent meaning that they can commit themselves to, that they can manage their life and that their situation is understandable—that it is basically comprehensible, even if it seems chaotic and out of control.

Ravensbrück was built for 3000 prisoners. At its height it held 35,000, 30,000 of whom were killed here. From the beginning, the SS did not want women with children in the camp; but as more and more territory was overrun, the camp swelled. After the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, there were hundreds of pregnant women deported here. Some are forced to abort; as numbers grow, women give birth and the babies are taken to a ‘hospital’ where they are slowly starved to death. The crematorium worked nonstop. Ash piles were dumped into the nearby lake as the Russians closed in. When the camp was overrun by the Red Army, 2000 women and 2000 men, mostly too infirm to be death-marched out of the camp, are found. Here

From the start the proportion of asocials in the camp was about one-third of the total population, and throughout the first years prostitutes, homeless and ‘work-shy’ women continued to pour in through the gates. Overcrowding in the asocial blocks increased fast, order collapsed, and then followed squalor and disease.  Although we learn a lot about what the political prisoners thought of the asocials, we learn nothing of what the asocials thought of them. Unlike the political women, they left no memoirs. Speaking out after the war would mean revealing the reason for imprisonment in the first place, and incurring more shame. Had compensation been available they might have seen a reason to come forward, but none was offered.  The German associations set up after the war to help camp survivors were dominated by political prisoners. And whether they were based in the communist East or in the West, these bodies saw no reason to help ‘asocial’ survivors. Such prisoners had not been arrested as ‘fighters’ against the fascists, so whatever their suffering none of them qualified for financial or any other kind of help. Nor were the Western Allies interested in their fate. Although thousands of asocials died at Ravensbrück, not a single black- or green-triangle survivor was called upon to give evidence for the Hamburg War Crimes trials, or at any later trials.  As a result these women simply disappeared: the red-light districts they came from had been flattened by Allied bombs, so nobody knew where they went. For many decades, Holocaust researchers also considered the asocials’ stories irrelevant; they barely rate mention in camp histories. Finding survivors amongst this group was doubly hard because they formed no associations, nor veterans’ groups. Today, door-knocking down the Düsseldorf Bahndamm, one of the few pre-war red-light districts not destroyed, brings only angry shouts of ‘Get off my patch'.

Documentaries     All My Loved Ones, directed by Matej Minac, 1999.     As If It Were Yesterday, directed by Myriam Abramowicz and Esther Hoffenberg, 1980.     The Flat, directed by Arnon Goldfinger, 2012.     Four Seasons Lodge, directed by Andrew Jacobs, 2008.     Generation War (Our Mothers, Our Fathers in the original German), directed by Philipp Kadelbach, 2013.     Hidden Children, directed by John Walker, 1994.     Hitler’s Children, directed by Chanoch Ze’evi, 2011.     Image Before My Eyes, directed by Josh Waletzky, 1981.     Imaginary Witness, directed by Daniel Anker, 2004.     Inheritance, directed by James Moll, 2006.     A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, directed by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky, 1997.     The Nazi Officer’s Wife, directed by Liz Garbus, 2003.     Torn, directed by Ronit Krown Kertsner, 2011.     Triumph of the Will, directed by Leni Riefenstahl, 1935. Features     Defiance, directed by Edward Zwick, 2008.     In Darkness, directed by Agnieszka Holland, 2011.     Inside Hana’s Suitcase, directed by Larry Weinstein, 2002.     The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski, 2002.     Sarah’s Key, directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, 2010.     Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg, 1993.     A Year of the Quiet Sun, directed by Krzysztof Zanussi, 1984.