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National Socialism had created a new type of political criminal: criminals who had not committed a crime.
Giving common criminals power over political prisoners was yet another innovation of National Socialism.
The Russian soldiers all knew his favourite saying: ‘Tutti kaputi’, and would shout it out to him across the camp square, smiling as though they were saying something reassuring.
All broken or useless
‘Vous me comprenez?’
Do you understand
‘Je comprends tout ce que vous dites, je ne comprends pas seulement pourquoi vous dites cela.’
I don’t believe in your “Good”. I believe in human kindness.’
And Yershov would answer in Russian: ‘The old sergeant had a fine command of every kind of language – except foreign ones.’
An empty-headed fellow – I heard his wife left him before the war.’
There is nothing more difficult than to be a stepson of the time; there is no heavier fate than to live in an age that is not your own.
The Day of Judgement had come; thousand-year-old truths had been declared errors. Truth had been sleeping for centuries, as though in a cocoon, inside ancient prejudices, errors and inaccuracies.
But immediately behind Viktor, right at his heels, followed doubt, suffering, lack of belief.
That morning I was reminded of what I’d forgotten during the years of the Soviet regime – that I was a Jew. Some Germans drove past on a lorry, shouting out: ‘Juden kaputt!’
The more sorrow there is in a man, the less hope he has of survival – the better, the kinder, the more generous he becomes.
And the source of all these hopes is one and the same – the life-instinct itself, blindly rebelling against the terrible fact that we must all perish without trace. I look round myself and simply can’t believe it: can we really, all of us, already be condemned, about to be executed?
Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of ‘a man’, and operates only with vast aggregates. Contemporary physics speaks of the greater or lesser probability of occurrences within this or that aggregate of individual particles. And are not the terrible mechanics of Fascism founded on the principle of quantum politics, of political probability?
The sacrifices made by Getmanov in the name of Party loyalty were sometimes cruel. In this world neighbours from the same village or teachers to whom one had been indebted since youth no longer existed; love or sympathy were no longer to be reckoned with.
The Russian prose he loved most was that of Gogol and Leskov.
It was sweet to be unshakeable. In passing judgement on people he had affirmed his own inner strength, his ideals, his purity. This was his consolation and his faith. He had never deviated from the directives of the Party.
If Fascism should ever be fully assured of its final triumph, the world will choke in blood. If the day ever dawns when Fascism is without armed enemies, then its executioners will know no restraint: the greatest enemy of Fascism is man.
She realized with surprise that although the process of evolution had taken millions of years, these people had needed only a few days to revert to the state of cattle, dirty and unhappy, captive and nameless
Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely. And however wretched and miserable this existence was, the thought of violent death still filled her with horror.
incongruous
From greek not agreeing
‘Asta! Asta! Wo sind die Juden?’
One of the most astonishing human traits that came to light at this time was obedience. There were cases of huge queues being formed by people awaiting execution – and it was the victims themselves who regulated the movement of these queues.
There was, of course, resistance; there were acts of courage and determination on the part of those who had been condemned; there were uprisings; there were men who risked their own lives and the lives of their families in order to save the life of a stranger. But the obedience of the vast mass of people is undeniable.
No, this obedience bears witness to a new force acting on human beings. The extreme violence of totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.
The instinct for self-preservation is supported by the hypnotic power of world ideologies. These call people to carry out any sacrifice, to accept any means, in order to achieve the highest of ends: the future greatness of the motherland, world progress, the future happiness of mankind, of a nation, of a class.
The violence of a totalitarian State is so great as to be no longer a means to an end; it becomes an object of mystical worship and adoration. How else can one explain the way certain intelligent, thinking Jews declared the slaughter of the Jews to be necessary for the happiness of mankind?
Another fact that allowed Fascism to gain power over men was their blindness. A man cannot believe that he is about to be destroyed. The optimism of people standing on the edge of the grave is astounding. The soil of hope – a hope that was senseless and sometimes dishonest and despicable – gave birth to a pathetic obedience that was often equally despicable.
Does human nature undergo a true change in the cauldron of totalitarian violence? Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and world-wide triumph of the dictatorial State is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian State is doomed.
Man’s innate yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed. Totalitarianism cannot renounce violence. If it does, it perishes. Eternal, ceaseless violence, overt or covert, is the basis of totalitarianism. Man does not renounce freedom voluntarily. This conclusion holds out hope for our time, hope for the future.
the workings of motors and running parts.
There his men were: timid, gloomy, easily amused, thoughtful; womanizers, harmless egotists, idlers, misers, contemplatives, good sorts . . . There they all were – going into battle for a common, just cause. The simplicity of this truth makes it difficult to talk about; but it is often forgotten by people who should, instead, take it as their point of departure.
Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities.
Now he had rediscovered this sense of wonder – something nearly all of us lose as we come to take the miracle of our lives for granted.
She had a fine straight nose and blue eyes that were lacking in warmth; you could tell she knew both her own value and that of other people.
Darensky was quite shaken by his sudden feeling of excitement. It was something he never got used to; it was always as though he was experiencing it for the first time. His considerable experience of women had never degenerated into mere habit; his experience was one thing, his joy and excitement quite another. It was this that made him a true lover of women.
The terrible thing about Chernetsov’s slander was that it contained an element of truth. What he did was to extrapolate general laws from occasional mistakes and incidental cruelties.
‘Dieu nous pardonnera.’
God will forgive us
‘Mais ce n’est pas votre métier,’
Je dirai non, mio padre, je dirai non!’
‘Donnez-moi votre main,’
The operation itself was equally mundane. If he had to shoot someone, Keyze called it ‘emptying a coffee-bean into someone’s head’; if he had to give someone an injection of carbolic acid, he called it ‘a small dose of elixir’. The whole mystery of human life seemed to lie in the coffee-bean or the elixir. Really this mystery was astonishingly simple.
When the Last Judgment approaches, not only philosophers and preachers, but everyone on earth – literate and illiterate – will ponder the nature of good and evil.
Great ideas are necessary in order to dig new channels, to remove stones, to bring down cliffs and fell forests; dreams of universal good are necessary in order that great waters should flow in harmony . . . Yes, if the sea was able to think, then every storm would make its waters dream of happiness. Each wave breaking against the cliff would believe it was dying for the good of the sea; it would never occur to it that, like thousands of waves before and after, it had only been brought into being by the wind.
The harm from time to time occasioned a society, class, race or State by this senseless kindness fades away in the light that emanates from those who are endowed with it. This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!
The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it.
‘Man never understands that the cities he has built are not an integral part of Nature. If he wants to defend his culture from wolves and snowstorms, if he wants to save it from being strangled by weeds, he must keep his broom, spade and rifle always at hand. If he goes to sleep, if he thinks about something else for a year or two, then everything’s lost. The wolves come out of the forest, the thistles spread and everything is buried under dust and snow. Just think how many great capitals have succumbed to dust, snow and couch-grass.’
Sokolov himself had just yawned and said how exhausting he found the heat. For some reason Viktor had been offended by this lukewarm welcome.
‘The arrogant bull,’ Viktor once said to Sokolov when Shishakov was mentioned. ‘He makes me feel like a Jew from a shtetl in the presence of a cavalry colonel.’
