The Goddess Of Warsaw Quotes

Once you decide you are no longer a lamb but a wolf, everything changes.

Survival is about secrets, about extraordinary measures taken to stay alive. If you survived, it means others did not. The trauma of a second chance at life, a second act, is at once miraculous and unendurable.

and

And yet, this death trap is no match for the lust eclipsing my heart, the constant unrequited craving. If I die tomorrow, I want him. Once. I’m asking you, God. You’ve taken so much already. Give me Aleksander and the rest of my fate is yours to play with. Do we have a deal?

stooped to my lowest denominator, risen to my highest calling.

a sick, distorted path to survival.

Your face . . . how far will you go to use it?

there.

The only way to survive this endless nightmare is to pretend that our past, the lives we once thought belonged to us forever,

Survival is not heroic; it is ugly. All

A Jew who doesn’t look like a Jew, I’ve been told my whole life.

cries of more

My husband’s efforts are admirable but won’t save us. I am not admirable, but I have guts.

I am not a star. I am a comet—a ball of gas, rock, and debris camouflaged in a spray of light.

Dan Kurzman’s The Bravest Battle: The 28 Days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was an excellent source of background and I highly recommend it. Estelle Laughlin, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and author of the deeply moving Transcending Darkness, I will

Of course, we knew of anti-Semitism, heard about “incidents,” but it didn’t affect our insulated world. Somehow, we believed we were immune. How blissfully naïve we were. I now know that the lines in the sand had been drawn all along, festering like cracks beneath our rare Calacatta gold marble surfaces.

I feigned happiness for my best friend, pretended that Jakub was my bashert—soulmate. I should have earned an award for my acting performances. The only person with whom I couldn’t pretend was me.

Funny, how war both entraps and frees you. What’s the point of niceties, manners, morals, and suppressed emotion when you could die at any given moment?

A killer back to a boy who’d lost his parents. At least he still has tears. The last vestige of humanity. Most of us have already gone numb.

You know, Bina”—she spits out my name—“your husband and his posse are our real enemies—intellectuals with their faces so deep inside their books that they can’t read the goddamn writing on the wall!

Thirty percent of Warsaw’s population was Jewish, the largest Jewish community in Europe. But they have murdered so many of us at this point—including at least 99 percent of our children.

Let’s be clear. I am not a star. I am a comet—a ball of gas, rock, and debris camouflaged in a spray of light.” My gaze narrows as if she were a lowly grip on my set. “Here’s what you don’t know, Miss Hayes, what the Enquirer has not yet uncovered . . . Browning is not my real name. It’s the make of the gun I used to kill the Nazi who pistol-whipped my father to death.

Everyone’s story on the ship heading to America was some version of the same—death camp horrors, immense loss, and heroic and criminal means of survival. If you breathed the air of a refugee, you would know he or she had already faced their own death long before. Eyes were haunted and unblinking. Everything was seen in too sharp a light. Pain was silent, distrustful, and bottomless. Where we were now headed was shrouded in mystery, but we all knew collectively that nothing could be worse than what was.

I wrap my arms tightly around myself. I am here, free, and hell is within walking distance. Is this what it looks like, feels like, to everyone who is not a Jew?

Guns matter. Food matters. Freedom matters. But to Jakub, the stories matter most.

I talk about my feelings for him in a tiny whisper, and she leans forward, her face near mine, never asking me to speak louder. The deepest pain is always the quietest.