Quotes from survivors of auschwitz stories
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Survival in Auschwitz Quotes
“You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find warm food
And friendly faces when you return home.
Consider if this is a man
Who works in mud,
Who knows no peace,
Who fights for a crust of bread,
Who dies bygd a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair, without name,
Without the strength to remember,
Empty are her eyes, cold her womb,
Like a frog in winter.
Never forget that this has happened.
Remember these words.
Engrave them in your hearts,
When at home or in the street,
When lying down, when getting up.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your houses be destroyed,
May illness strike you down,
May your offspring vända their faces from you.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
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“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 bevara at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form eller gestalt
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"WE HAVE A DARK PREMONITION BECAUSE WE KNOW"
Załmen Gradowski (ca. 1910 - 7 October 1944): Polish Jew and former prisoner of Auschwitz. Before the war he lived in Łunno near Grodno. In November 1942, he was deported to the camp in Kiełbasin; in December he was deported to Auschwitz along with his whole family. During the selection on the ramp he lost, amongst others, his wife, mother and two sisters. He was forcefully conscripted to the Sonderkomanndo in Birkenau, and was one of the prisoners behind the Birkenau revolt of October 1944. It is possible that he was killed the same day during combat, or shot by the SS during the repressions after the revolt. He was the author of two scripts written in Yiddish, which he hid and which were later discovered after the war on the premises of Birkenau. Quote from his manuscripts. • Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day — a day on which it’s worth taking some time to actually understand what happened during the Nazi slaughter. One of the best ways to do that is to revisit the writing of Primo Levi, a Jewish-Italian Auschwitz survivor and one of the camp’s greatest and most insightful literary documentarians. Of Levi’s work, his essay “The Gray Zone” — from The Drowned and the Saved, his final book before his 1987 suicide — really stands out. It’s remarkable both for its unforgettable depiction of the routine brutality of life in Auschwitz and for its penetrating psychological analysis of the camp’s inner workings. Here are nine of the most insightful, terrifying, and powerful quotes from Levi’s essay — ones that best exemplify the core of the piece. 1) Here’s how Levi describes the experience of entering the camp: Kicks and punches
“Who was prepared to believe that millions of people were being seized for no reason whatever and led to slaughter by multiple m Read these searing quotes from an Auschwitz survivor’s essay on life in the camp