Great Throughts Treasury

"We become aware, with amazement, that we have forgotten nothing, every memory evoked rises in front of us painfully clear."

"We collected in a group in front of their door, and we experienced within ourselves a grief that was new for us, the ancient grief of the people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed in every century."

"We are slaves, deprived of any rights, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but that a right 'there and 'it remained, and we must defend it vigorously because it' s the last one: the right 'to refuse our consent."

"We cannot understand [Fascism], but we can and must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard...because what happened can happen again...For this reason, it is everyone's duty to reflect on what happened."

"We must therefore certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water, and dry off his jacket. We must polish our shoes, not 'cause he prescribes the rules, but for dignity' and properties'. We have to walk straight, without scuffing hooves, not already 'in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, do not begin to die."

"We spoke of strangers: Gramsci, Salvemini, Gobetti, the Rosselli; who were they? There was therefore a second story, a parallel story to the one that the school had given us from above?"

"We need to be wary of about the same (sodium is almost equal to potassium, but with sodium nothing would happen), the same paranoid, of roughly, dell'oppure, of all surrogates and of all the patches. The differences may be small, but lead to radically different consequences, like the needles of trade; the chemical trade consists in good part in quadrassi from these differences, in knowing them closely, in predicting the effects. Not only the job of the chemical."

"We felt, and so it was, that nothing full of death where for ten days we strolled as lights turned off had found its solid core, a condensation nucleus: four armed men, but not armed against us; four messengers of peace, from the rough and boyish faces beneath their heavy fur hats. Not greeted, not smiling; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was the same shame we know so well, that drowned us after the selections, and every time he touched us assist or submit to an outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, what the right test in front of the wrong committed by others, and remorse that exists, which has been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that its goodwill was little, or no, and should not have availed in defense. So for us even the hour of liberty rang out grave and closed and he filled our souls at a time of joy and a painful sense of decency, so we wanted to wash our consciences and our memories of the ugliness that lay: and sorrow, because we felt that this could not happen that nothing ever could happen good and pure to erase our past, and that the scars of would remain within us forever, and in the memories of those who saw it, and in the places where it happened, and stories that we made. Because, and this is the tremendous privilege of our generation and of my people, none better than we ever could grasp the incurable nature of the offense, which spreads like a contagion. E 'foolish to think that human justice can eradicate. It is an inexhaustible source of evil; it breaks the body and soul of the submerged, it stifles them and renders them abject; it returns as ignominy over the oppressors, is perpetuated as hatred survivors; and swarms in a thousand ways, against the will of all, as revenge, as a moral capitulation, as denial, as weariness, as renunciation."

"We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere."

"We the survivors are not the true witnesses. The true witnesses, those in possession of the unspeakable truth are the drowned, the dead, the disappeared."

"We too are so dazzled by power and money as to forget our essential fragility, forget that all of us our in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that beyond the fence stands the lords of death, and not far away the train is waiting."

"We travelled here in the sealed wagons; we saw our women and our children leave towards nothingness; we, transformed into slaves, have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards to our silent labors, killed in our spirit long before our anonymous death. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man?s presumption made of man in Auschwitz."

"We were also born, Line said abruptly. Mendel questioned her with a look, and Line tried to clarify her thought: Born, expelled. Russia conceived us, nourished us, made us grow in her darkness, as in a womb; then she had labor pains, contractions, and threw us out; and now here we are, naked and new, like babies just born. Isn't it the same for you? Narische meidele, vos darst do freden? Mendel rebutted, feeling on his lips and affectionate smile and a light veil over his eyes."

"We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless."

"We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion which I have gradually come to accept by reading what other survivors have written, including myself, when I re-read my writings after a lapse of years. We, the survivors, are not only a tiny but also an anomalous minority. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless."

"Why does it happen? Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story?"

"When your friend falls down, you do not rejoice, nor could he not have help to get up."

"Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting. by Primo Levi in Drowned"

"We will not return No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz"

"You who live safe in your warm houses, you who find returning in the evening hot food and friendly faces: consider if this is a man who works in the mud who knows no peace who fights for a bread who dies because of a yes or a no. Consider if this is a woman, without hair and unnamed no more strength to remember eyes empty and her womb cold like a frog in winter. Never forget that this was: remember these words. Carve them in your heart being in home because, bed, rising; repeat them to your children. Or have you undone the house, illness impede you, may your children twist their faces from you."