Warsaw Ghetto Survivor Quotes

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!

The Nazis understand everything except humour.

There are times when dreams sustain us more than facts. To read a book and surrender to a story is to keep our very humanity alive.” - Warsaw ghetto survivor Helen Fagin

The rebbe of elechów, counseling his followers to go into hiding, was alleged to have said: “Every Jew who survives openly sanctifies God.” Each Jewish survivor, he declared, is a hero resisting the Nazis because he refuses to extinguish his precious life.52 Rabbi Isaac Nissenbaum in the Warsaw ghetto was reported to have said: Now is the time for the sanctification of life [kiddush ha-hayim] and not for the Sanctification of the Name [kiddush ha-shem] through death. Once when our enemies demanded our soul, the Jew martyred his body for kiddush ha-shem. Today when the enemy demands the body, it is the Jew’s obligation to defend himself, to preserve his life.53

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

Farewell Warsaw, the city of joy and anguish, we shall never return! You stood uncaring when we cried to you for help in our despair. I hate you, you let a third of your inhabitants die before your eyes, without a word of protest against that terrible injustice! The ghetto was lit from above by the bright summer sun, but darkness, the smell of burning, and stench of corpses reigned inside. [*]

Hanna Krall’s book Shielding the Flame drew on the experience of Dr. Marek Edelman, who before he died in 2009 was the sole survivor of the five-person command that led the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

showing how sometimes even the most insignificant events can take on the greatest importance later on.