Buchenwald Quotes

“Escape was not our goal since it was so unrealistic. What we wanted was to survive, to live long enough to tell the world what had happened in Buchenwald.”
― Jack Werber, Saving Children: Diary of a Buchenwald Survivor and Rescuer

“Ein Zitat ist tausend Bücher wert.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald, I became very ill; some sort of poisoning. I was transferred to a hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.

One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.

From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.”
― Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident

“​Those prisoners who had been in Buchenwald and survived were, in fact, imprisoned for that very reason in our own camps: How could you have survived an annihilation camp? Something doesn't smell right!​”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Only pious people believe that hell is in a world beyond.”
― Ernst Wiechert, Tidings: A Novel

“One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin