Quotes from Tadeusz Borowski

I smile and I think that one human being must always be discovering another - through love. And that this is the most important thing on earth, and the most lasting.

I risked my life to save lives. I'm not looking for glory. I just want people to know the truth about what happened.

What a curious power words have.

There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.

The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality; crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power and power is obtained with money. To work is senseless, because money cannot be obtained through work, but through exploitation of others. And if we cannot exploit as much as we wish, at least let us work as little as we can. Moral duty? We believe neither in the morality of man nor in the morality of systems. [p. 168]

Real hunger is when one man regards another man as something to eat.

I smile and I think that one human being must always be discovering another - through love. And that this is the most important thing on earth, and the most lasting.

It is the camp law: people going to their death must be deceived to the very end.

neither poems nor prose just a length of rope just the wet earth -- that's the way home. neither vodka nor bread just bursts of rage just more new graves -- that's youth and that's love. neither sleep nor waking neither joy nor laughter just tears in the night -- so the rope, paper, knife.

Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death.

I think that for those who have suffered unjustly, justice alone is not enough. They want the guilty to suffer unjustly too. Only this will they understand as justice.

We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers.

But I think we should speak about all the things that are happening around us. We are not evoking evil irresponsibly or in vain, for we have now become a part of it...

We said that there is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself. And, having saved himself, he will commit crimes for increasingly trivial reasons; he will commit them first out of duty, then from habit, and finally -for pleasure.

It is not our fault that the world is bad, and we do not want to die changing it. We want to live- that is all.

we have red triangles as politicals, so we let the

Crematorium Esperanto is a language we can all learn. Dehumanization, as Borowski shows us, is a human process. The meaning of death is that we organize our actions around it. Fascism is not limited to a certain time and place; it is a certain orientation of life toward death. Extermination does not sanctify a victim or dignify a cause. It only instructs us about human possibility.

Real hunger is when one man regards another man as something to eat.