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Keep your eyes down, that has been the lesson of the years of war. No good ever came from noticing the business of others.
The circus is a great equalizer, though; no matter class or race or background, we are all the same here, judged on our talent.
Why are we so hard on one another? I wonder. Hadn’t the world already given us challenges enough?
But we represent everything Hitler hates: the freaks and oddities in a regime that is all about conformity. They will not permit us to go on forever.
My life with Erich, I see now, had been temporary, like another act in one of our shows. When it ended, I had not shed a tear. Rather, I simply changed costumes and moved on.
There have been circuses from the times of the Romans and Greeks, our traditions centuries old. We had survived the Middle Ages, the Napoleonic Wars, the Great War. We would survive this, too.
You love the people they were before, below all the awfulness that made them do this thing, you know?”
“One day you may feel differently,” she replies. “Sometimes our forever life does not last as long as we think.”
His kind of courage was boundless, though, and he would not have turned away a person in need, whether a star
performer or a simple laborer or a child such as Theo with no skills at all. It was not about the circus or family connections, but human decency.
“We cannot change who we are. Sooner or later we will all have to face ourselves.”
never assume that you know the mind of another.
