Quotes from Walter Kempowski

They told us to take anything we wanted, be we were so delighted to be free, nothing else seemed to be of any value.

As always when he went abroad, Jonathan regarded the German passport officers with a degree of wistfulness. Soon he would be placing himself under foreign sovereignty, a guest; he would have to hold his tongue instead of being allowed to demonstrate his superiority. When you'd started a world war, murdered Jews and taken people's bicycles away (in Holland) the cards were stacked against you.

Perhaps that was the day when the bombed synagogue opened again. Or the one when I went to a cobbler who was repairing shoes with the leather from stolen Torah rolls. "I didn't know it was sacred leather," he said. We collected all the pieces together, and he refused the money that I tried to give him for a few ladies' shoes with Hebrew letters written in ancient ink on the soles.

The American girls, undaunted, maintained their natural warmth, and in their unrivalled sympathy there appeared genuine maternal feelings that did not alter for national differences, but that was feeble consolation in this profound sadness over the fact that "being a human being among other human beings" only ever happens in dreams of a perfect world.