Great Throughts Treasury

"All took leave from life in the manner which most suited them. Some praying, some deliberately drunk, others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed their luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundreds other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to die tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?"

"All the bargaining-transactions outlined above are based on the smuggling of materials belonging to the Lager. This is why the SS are so eager to suppress them: the very gold of our teeth is their property, as sooner or later, torn from the mouths of the living or the dead; it ends up in their hands. So it is natural that they should take care that the gold does not leave the camp."

"A country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful."

"A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn't he?"

"After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale."

"A scientist's life, the author says, is indeed conflictual, formed by battles, defeats, and victories: but the adversary is always and only the unknown, the problem to be solved, the mystery to be clarified. It is never a matter of civil war; even though of different opinions, or of different political leanings, scientists dispute each other, they compete, but they do not battle: they are bound together by a strong alliance, by the common faith "in the validity of Maxwell's or Boltzmann's equations," and by the common acceptance of Darwinism and the molecular structure of DNA."

"A memory evoked too often and expressed as history tends to become a... crystallized, perfected, ornate, settling itself rather than pure and memory stereotype, and growing at their expense."

"All they discover more or less early in their life, that perfect happiness is not feasible, but few would rather dwell on the opposite view: that this is also a perfect misery. The moments that are opposed to the creation of both the two states-limits are of the same nature: these arise from our human condition, which is the enemy of every infinite. It opposes our ever insufficient knowledge of the future; and this is called, in one case, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of tomorrow."

"Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells us his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differentials calculus. It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is, commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter."

"At that time I had not yet been taught the doctrine I was later to learn so hurriedly in the Lager: that man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, while he who errs but once pays dearly"

"An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy."

"Anyone who has obeyed nature by transmitting a piece of gossip experiences the explosive relief that accompanies the satisfying of a primary need."

"At the time I was very young and still imagined that it was possible to dissuade his boss for anything, so I laid two or three arguments against it, but immediately saw that beneath their blows Commander hardens as copper plate under hammer."

"Better not to do than to do, better to meditate than to act, better his astrophysics, the threshold of the Unknowable, than my chemistry, a mess compounded of stenches, explosions and small futile mysteries. I thought of another moral, more down to earth and concrete, and I believe that every militant chemist can confirm it: that one must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost the same as potassium, but with sodium nothing would have happened_, the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates, and all patchwork. the difference can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad's switch points; the chemist's trade consists in good part in being aware of these differences, knowing them close up, and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist's trade."

"Better to err through omission than through commission: better to refrain from steering the fate of others, since it is already so difficult to navigate one's own."

"But Gedalah had something in mind. He sent four men to collect a dozen pumpkins, and he had them set in the pylons that supported the overhead power line that ran the train, one pumpkin to each pylon."

"Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea."

"Beware of analogies: for millenia they corrupted medicine, and it may be their fault that today's pedagogical systems are so numerous, and after three thousand years of argument we still don't know which is best."

"But here in the Lager there are no criminals nor madmen; no criminals because there is no moral law to contravene, no madmen because we are wholly devoid of free will, as our every action is, in time and place, the only conceivable one."

"By order of the Commander male and female rabbits they lived in separate cells strict sexual abstinence. But once a night raid without causing much more damage, smashed all cells so that in the morning we found the rabbits indiscriminate and selflessly devoted to breeding campaign: do not give the bombs were scared."

"But many, many stories were told; from what could be gathered, all fifty of the mine's inhabitants had reacted on each other, two by two, as in combinatorial analysis, that is to say, everyone with all the others, and especially every man with all the women, old maids or married, and every woman with all the men. All I had to do was to select two names at random, better if different sex, and ask a third person, "What happened with those two?" and lo and behold, a splendid story was unfolded for me, since everyone knew the story of everyone else."

"But where we're going, we do not know. We may fail to survive the diseases and escape selections, we may endure the effort and hunger that we dissolve: then? Here, currently far from curses and beatings, once again we return to ourselves and meditate and then appears clear that we will not return. We have traveled all the way here in sealed wagons! We have seen how the way of nothingness leaving our wives and children; Once you have made ??us slaves, we marched hundreds of times back and forth in vain, extinguished the soul before faceless death. We will not be back. From here, nobody is allowed to go out, because in the world could bring, along with the sign imprinted into the body, a mean news about how much man needs courage, in Auschwitz, to be a man."

"Caselli was a modest, taciturn man, in whose sad but proud eyes could be read: - He is a great scientist, and as his 'famulus', I am also a little great; - I, though humble, know things that he does not know; - I know him better than he knows himself; I foresee his acts; - I have power over him; I defend and protect him; - I can say bad things about him because I love him; that is not granted to you."

"Clausner shows me the bottom of his bowl. Where others have carved their numbers, and Alberto and I our names, Clausner has written: 'Ne pas chercher … comprendre."

"Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment."

"Darwin was not afraid to look deeply into the void. His bold view can be seen as either noble and pessimistic or noble and admirable. For people of science, he is a hero. Denying man a privileged place in creation... he reaffirms with his own intellectual courage the dignity of man."

"Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction."

"Consider whether this is a man, who labors in the mud, who knows no peace, who fights for a crust of bread, who dies at a yes or a no."

"Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were learning to unravel, was poetry..."

"Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid."

"Destroy the home is difficult, almost as much as creating it: it was not easy, it was not fast, but you have achieved Germans. Here we are docile in front of your eyes: our side no longer have to fear nothing or acts of rebellion, or words of challenge, even an accusatory look."

"Destroying man is hard, almost as much as creating it: it was not easy, was not short, but you did it, the Germans. Here we are docile under your eyes: from our side you have nothing more to fear: no acts of revolt, no words of defiance, not one judge look."

"Does not ingenuity consist in the finding or creating of connections between apparently extraneous orders of ideas?)"

"Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last ? the power to refuse our consent."

"Each of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; In each the trace of each."

"For a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful."

"Except for cases of pathological incapacity, one can and must communicate, and thereby contribute in a useful and easy way to the peace of others and oneself, because silence, the absence of signals, is itself a signal, but an ambiguous one, and ambiguity generates anxiety and suspicion. To say that it is impossible to communicate is false; one always can."

"Fear is supremely contagious, and its immediate reaction is to make one try to run away."

"For he who loses all often easily loses himself."

"Everybody is somebody's Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis."

"Fascism had silenced them for twenty years, and they explained to us that fascism was not only a bad government clownish and improvident, but the denier of Justice; had not only dragged Italy into an unjust war and poor, but had risen and had established itself as the guardian of legality and a detestable order, founded on coercion of the worker, the uncontrolled profit of those who exploit the labor of others, on silence imposed to those who think and do not want to be a servant, on the systematic lies and calculated. They told us that our mocking indifference was not enough; He had to turn into anger, and anger to be channeled into a revolt organic and timely, but we did not teach you how to plant a bomb, or how to shoot a rifle."

"For human nature is such that grief and pain - even simultaneously suffered - do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of surviving in the camp. And this is the reason why so often in free life one hears it said that man is never content."

"For living men, the units of time always have a value, which increases in ratio to the strength of the internal resources of the person living through them; but for us, hours, days, months spilled out sluggishly from the future into the past, always too slowly, a valueless and superfluous material, of which we sought to rid ourselves as soon as possible. ... For us, history had stopped."

"For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: I will understand this, too, I will understand everything."

"For us, on the contrary, the Lager is not a punishment; for us, no end is foreseen and the Lager is nothing but a manner of living assigned to us, without limits of time, in the bosom of the Germanic social organism."

"For people condemned to death, tradition prescribes an austere ceremony, calculated to emphasize that all passions and anger have died down, and that the act of justice represents only a sad duty towards society which moves even the executioner to pity for the victim. Thus the condemned man is shielded from all external cares, he is granted solitude and, should he want it, spiritual comfort; in short, care is taken that he should feel around him neither hatred nor arbitrariness, only necessity and justice, and by means of punishment, pardon. But to us this was not granted, for we were many and time was short. And in any case, what had we to repent, for what crime did we need pardon?"

"He came to a sudden dissolution. The door was opened with a crash, the darkness eccheggio 'foreign orders, and of those barbaric barking of Germans when they command that seem to give the wind to a centuries-old anger."

"He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good."

"From this rocky love those asbestos only a few of broaching my evenings in the mine were born two talked about the islands and freedom - first to my Prishta to write after school with his writings by force."

"Get up: the illusory barrier of the warm blankets, the thin armor of sleep, the nightly evasion with its very torments drops to pieces around us, and we find ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to insult, atrociously naked and vulnerable."