Quotes about Survival

I remember a young Hungarian Jew, his shoulders stooped like an old man's, who confessed to some infraction so as to be beaten in his uncle's stead. I am young, he said, and stronger than he. He was young but no less weak. He did not survive the beating

I didn't know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever.

One German officer lived in the house opposite ours. He had a room with the Kahn family. They said he was a charming man - calm, likable, polite, and sympathetic. Three days after he moved in he brought Madame Kahn a box of chocolates. The optimists rejoiced.

To forget a holocaust is to kill twice.

After trampling over many bodies and corpses, we succeeded in getting inside. We let ourselves fall to the ground.

From Jeff Greenfield: I once asked Elie Wiesel Are you an optimist or a pessimist? An optimist, he said. I have to be.

I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.

Men to the left! Women to the right! Eight words spokern quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother.

The word "chimney" here was not an abstraction; it floated in the air, mingled with the smoke. It was, perhaps, the only word that had a real meaning in this place.

We marched. Gates opened and closed. We continued to march between the barbed wire. At every step, white signs with black skulls looked down on us. The inscription: WARNING! DANGER OF DEATH. What irony. Was there here a single place where one was not in danger of death?

Jews, listen to me,' she cried. I see a fire! I see flames, huge flames.

Most people thought that we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.