Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.
Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.
A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.
Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who stop to consider the antithesis; that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.
I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.
... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once...
He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good
I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.
Our ignorance allowed us to live, as you are in the mountains, and your rope is frayed and about to break, but you don't know it and feel safe.
The aims of life are the best defense against death.
Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.
...he never asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward.
An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
For a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.
She had asked the older women: "What is that fire?" And they had replied: "It is we who are burning.
Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.
The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.
The sea of grief has no shores, no bottom; no one can sound its depths.
In the space of a few minutes the sky turned black and it began to rain.
Today, I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.
It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end
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I am persuaded that normal human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed toward a goal and that idleness, or aimless work (like Auschwitz's Arbeit), gives rise to suffering and to atrophy.
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(this is a story interwoven with freezing dawns.)
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 he who loses all often easily loses himself.
...man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.
Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment...
The truck went on its way in the night and Gedaleh shouted, laughing, "If not this way, how? And if not now, when?
If I'm not for myself, who will be for me? If not this way, how? If not now, when?
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.
