Quotes About Memory

Y lo que nos lleva al recuerdo de la desgracia y a las lamentaciones, sin saciarse nunca de ellas, ¿no diremos que es irracional y perezoso y allegado de la cobardía.

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.

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.

this is a story interwoven with freezing dawns.)

Un recuerdo evocado demasiado a menudo y expresado en forma de historia tiende a convertirse en un estereotipo... cristalizado, perfeccionado, adornado, instalándose en sí mismo en lugar de la memoria pura y dura, y creciendo a sus expensas.

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.

The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to becomeerased as the years go by, but often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features. Judges know this very well: almost never do two eyewitnesses of the same event describe it in the same way and with the same words, even if the event is recent and if neither of them has a personal interest in distorting it.

Today the only thing left of the life of those days is what one needs to suffer hunger and cold; I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself.

Perhaps memory is like a bucket; if you want to cram into it more fruit than it will hold, the fruit is crushed.

Oggi, questo vero oggi in cui io sto seduto a un tavolo e scrivo, io stesso non sono convinto che queste cose sono realmente accadute.

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.

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.

The things I had seen and suffered were burning inside of me; I felt closer to the dead than the living, and felt guilty at being a man, because men had built Auschwitz, and Auschwitz had gulped down millions of human beings, and many of my friends, and a woman who was dear to my heart.

An extreme case of the distortion of the memory of a committed guilty act is found in its suppression. Here, too, the borderline between good and bad faith can be vague; behind the I don't know and I do not remember that one hears in courtrooms there is sometimes the precise intent to lie, but at other times it is a fossilized lie, rigidified in a formula.

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

Se è vero che non c'è maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria, è altrettanto vero che rievocare un'angoscia ad animo tranquillo, seduti quieti alla scrivania, è fonte di soddisfazione profonda.

Molte cose furono allora fra noi dette e fatte; ma di queste è bene che non resti memoria.

Hier, vorübergehend fern von Flüchen und von Schlägen, haben wir die Möglichkeit, wieder zu uns selbst zu finden und nachzudenken, und da wird uns klar, dass wir nie zurückkehren werden. (...) Wir werden nicht zurückkehren. Von hier darf keiner fort, denn er könnte mit dem ins Fleisch geprägten Mal auch die böse Kunde in die Welt tragen, was in Auschwitz Menschen aus Menschen zu machen gewagt haben.

Riferito ai Muselmänner] Essi popolano la mia memoria della loro presenza senza volte, e se potessi racchiudere in un'immagine tutto il male del nostro tempo, sceglierei questa immagine, che mi è familiare: un uomo scarno, dalla fronte china e dalle spalle curve, sul cui volto o nei cui occhi non si posso leggere traccia di pensiero. Se i sommersi non hanno storia, e una sola e ampia è la via della perdizione, le vie della salvazione sono invece molte, aspre ed impensate.

The tunes are few, a dozen, the same ones every day, morning and evening : marches to popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraved on our minds and will be the last thing in Lager that we shall forget : they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards.

Se è vero che non c'è maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria, è altrettanto vero che rievocare un'angoscia ad animo tranquillo, seduti quieti alla scrivania, è fonte di soddisfazione profonda.

? ????? ?????? ?????????: ?????? ???? ??????? ??, ??? ?????????? ???????, ??? ????? ?????? ???????... I still recall the wondrous moment When you appeared before my eyes, Just like a fleeting apparition, Just like pure beauty's distillation...

Knowledge is of no use unless it is actually in your mind, so that it can be produced at a moment's notice.

One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten.