Quotes About Survival

A man can laugh while he suffers.

It was the beginning of the war. I was twelve years old, my parents were alive, and God still dwelt in our town.

Then the train resumed its journey, leaving in its wake, in a snowy field in Poland, hundreds of naked orphans without a tomb.

There are those who tell me that I survived in order to write this text. I am not convinced. I don't know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself. A miracle? Certainly not. If heaven could or would perform a miracle for me, why not for others more deserving than myself? It was nothing more than chance. However, having survived, I needed to give some meaning to my survival.

How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

Torture is the act of making someone die a slow death, making the prisoner die several times.

The shock of finding a familiar word in an unfamiliar setting.] A SS man would examine us. Whenever he found a weak one, a musulman as we called them, he would write his number down: good for the crematory.

What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life—that is what is abnormal.

Men to the left! Women to the right! Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother.

Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs. This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years. It is in his name that I speak to you and that I express to you my deepest gratitude as one who has emerged from the Kingdom of Night.

To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.     SOMETIMES

Even if I wrote on nothing else, it would never be enough, even if all the survivors did nothing but write about their experiences, it would still not be enough. *Response when asked how much longer is he going to write about the Holocaust

The gates of the camp opened. It seemed as though an even darker night was waiting for us on the other side. The

We were the masters of nature, the masters of the world. We had transcended everything—death, fatigue, our natural needs. We were stronger than cold and hunger, stronger than the guns and the desire to die, doomed and rootless, nothing but numbers, we were the only men on earth. At

I remember a young Hungarian Jew, his shoulders stooped like an old man's, who confessed to some infraction so as to be beaten in his uncle's stead. I am young, he said, and stronger than he. He was young but no less weak. He did not survive the beating

I didn't know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever.

Un giorno riuscii ad alzarmi, dopo aver raccolto tutte le mie forze. Volevo vedermi nello specchio che era appeso al muro di fronte: non mi ero più visto dal ghetto. Dal fondo dello specchio un cadavere mi contemplava. Il suo sguardo nei miei occhi non mi lascia più.

Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings! the Hungarian police were screaming. That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our only link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death.

YOM KIPPUR. The Day of Atonement. Should we fast? The question was hotly debated. To fast could mean a more certain, more rapid death. In this place, we were always fasting. It was Yom Kippur year-round. But there were those who said we should fast, precisely because it was dangerous to do so. We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we were capable of singing His praises. I

To forget a holocaust is to kill twice.

OUR FIRST ACT AS FREE MEN was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. That's all we thought about. No thought of revenge, or of parents. Only of bread. And

It was only after the war that I found out who had knocked that night. It was an inspector of the Hungarian police, a friend of my father's. Before we entered the ghetto, he had told us, "Don't worry. I'll warn you if there is danger." Had he been able to speak to us that night, we might still have been able to flee … But by the time we succeeded in opening the window, it was too late. There was nobody outside.