#auschwitz

Auschwitz?! That is a name I had heard before. There is not much time for thinking. It had been raining here not so long ago. The asphalt of the wet, wide platform reflects the light of the high lighting-poles. The row of armed SS men competes in howling with their dogs they hold on leashes ↗

— Azriel Feuerstein

#azriel-feuerstein #holocaust #the-tumbler #men

At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook. ↗

— William Styron

#banality #dachau #evil #hate #holocaust

Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints. ↗

— Viktor E. Frankl

#auschwitz #man #suffering #true-colors #design

Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?" And the answer: "Where was man? ↗

— William Styron

#evil #god #humanity #man #understanding

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur. ↗

— Edward Bond

#cannot #occur #place #tragedy #which

The sad and horrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being murdered... This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust and this is the lesson which Auschwitz taught us. ↗

— Ariel Sharon

#being #cared #conclusion #holocaust #horrible

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. ↗

— George Steiner

#bach #day #evening #go #his

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. ↗

— Primo Levi

#shoah #equality

Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response. ↗

— Elie Wiesel

#answer #asked #auschwitz #even #i