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The Nazi officers are dressed in black. They look at death with the indifference of a gravedigger. In Auschwitz, human life has so little value that no one is shot anymore; a bullet is more valuable than a human being.
It doesn’t matter how many schools the Nazis close, he would say to them. Each time someone stops to tell a story and children listen, a school has been established.
Dita caressed the books. They were broken and scratched, worn, with reddish-brown patches of mildew; some were mutilated. But without them, the wisdom of centuries of civilization might be lost—geography, literature, mathematics, history, language. They were precious.
Adults wear themselves out pointlessly searching for a joy they never find. But in children, it bursts out of every pore.
Within their pages, books contain the wisdom of the people who wrote them. Books never lose their memory.”
“Run away from him as if he were the plague. Don’t put yourself in his path. The Nazi bosses practice dark magic rituals—I know. They go into the woods and celebrate black masses. Himmler, the head of the SS, never makes a decision without consulting his psychic. They’re people from the dark side—I know. Heaven help the poor soul who gets in their way. Their evil isn’t of this world; it comes from hell. I believe that Mengele is the fallen angel. He’s Lucifer himself who’s taken over a human body. If he’s after someone, may God have mercy on their soul.”
If God exists, then so does the devil. They’re travelers on the same rail line, moving in opposite directions. Good and evil somehow counterbalance each other. You could almost say they need each other: How would we know that we are doing good if evil didn’t exist so that we could compare them and see the difference? she wonders. There’s no other place in the world where the devil moves as freely as he does in Auschwitz.
