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“You must be your own advocate... You can't rely solely on your doctors or you family or anyone else; you have to stay on top of your own care, no matter how sick or exhausted you feel. Learn everything you can about your disease and your diagnosis, locate the very best doctors, find out exactly what drugs and treatments your doctors are giving you and what they're supposed to do, never stop researching and asking questions, and check, check, check what the doctors tell you-get second and third opinions. All of this is up to you because ultimately no one else-not your family members who love you, or your doctors, who want you to survive-is responsible for your health. You need a support team, of course, but in the end, you run this race on your own.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“For those who have suffered unjustly, justice alone is not enough. They want the guilty to suffer unjustly too. Only this will they understand as justice.”
― Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman, Penguin 1986 Edition

“She wondered if she made them uncomfortable. She was a big woman, and made no attempt at being pretty. Her hair was short and often uncombed, and she didn't bother with makeup. She was bitterly comfortable inside her own body, in a way women often weren't, and sometimes that unsettled people.”
― Leslie J. Anderson, The Unmothers

“Listening to the voices of the Ravensbruck women I looked for clues about why this group survived. I could almost hear Maria Bielicka banging her fists on the table as she tried to explain why survival was in the blood of every Polish woman, 'passed on from mother to daughter. Jeannie Roussau… survived because she refused not to... she refused to make German arms... she refused to die on the freezing airfield and escaped back to the man camp, hiding in a typhus truck. When Bernadotte arrived, Jeannie was locked in the Strafblock but refused to be left behind, and persuaded the Blockova to let her out. 'You can refuse what is happening. Or go along with it. I was in the refusal camp,' she said. I asked her how she had the courage. 'I don't know. I was young. I thought if I do it, it will work. You simply cannot accept some things. Certain things.”
― Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women