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They decided to educate the Jewish children even though they were going to be sent to Auschwitz the next day. The Italian commissar wanted to maintain normalcy right up until the last minute of deportation to Auschwitz.
mothers washing your children and preparing them for the long ride to Auschwitz. They even prepare foods to bring along for their comfort. Some Jews await deportation in the morn by getting drunk, some by praying. The Nazis don’t wish to know what they do. These are the acts of condemned people whose fate is to die miserably.
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.
At times selections at Auschwitz another death camps were merely arbitrary, not even necessarily based on fitness or health of the Jewish prisoner.
Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man.
Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness;
still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last—the power to refuse our consent. So
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.
Like a stone the foreign word falls to the bottom of every soul. “Get up”: the illusory barrier of the warm blankets, the thin armor of sleep, the nightly evasion with its very torments drops to pieces around us, and we find ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to insult, atrociously naked and vulnerable. A day begins like every day, so long as not to allow us reasonably to conceive its end, so much cold, so much hunger, so much exhaustion separate us from it: so that it is better to concentrate one’s attention and desires on the block of grey bread, which is small but which will certainly be
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saved and the drowned.
in the Lager things are different: here the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone.
“to he that has, will be given; to he that has not, will be taken away.”
They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be
