Paromita’s Reviews > Life and Fate > Status Update

"No, whatever life holds in store – hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp – they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man’s eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be . . ."

Great book. A masterpiece.

"Why were their destinies so confused, so obscure? As for those who had been killed or executed, they were still alive in her memory. She could remember their smiles, their jokes, their laughter, their sad lost eyes, their hopes and despairs."

When it is all over, what remains? And is it ever truly over?

"Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end."

Simple and profound.

"Without his realizing it, everything that had happened to him began to seem quite normal, quite natural. His new life was the rule; he had begun to get used to it. It was his past life that had been the exception, and slowly he began to forget what it had been like"

So tragic. Losing oneself gradually...the terror, the slow decay, becoming a cog in the machine, a product of circumstances...

"There was something improbable about how very bourgeois and ordinary it all was: the more normal, the more human the conversation, the less the speaker seemed like a human being. There’s something ghastly about a monkey imitating the ways of a man. At the same time Krymov had a clear sense that he himself was no longer a human being – when had people ever had conversations like this in front of a third person...?"

"There was just one thing he didn’t understand. Mixed with his joy and his feeling of triumph was a sadness that seemed to well up from somewhere deep underground, a sense of regret for something sacred and cherished that seemed to be slipping away from him. For some reason he felt guilty, but he had no idea what of or before whom."

So powerful and just as relevant today.

"This soft, white snow settling over the carnage of the city was time itself; the present was turning into the past, and there was no future."

There is no victory, only devastation, only loss, only unexpressed grief that can destroy one from within.

"He had never killed a child; he had never arrested anyone. But he had broken the fragile dyke that had protected the purity of his soul from the seething darkness around him. The blood of the camps and ghettos had gushed over him and carried him away . . . There was no longer any divide between him and the darkness... What had happened to him? Was it folly, chance? Or was it the deepest law of his soul?"

Too late?

"Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die – anything to stop remembering. How could he have taken that moment of drunken folly for the deepest truth of his life? Why had he finally given in after holding back for all those long, difficult years?"

Heartbreaking, stark, true.

"Over their heads hung a terrible frozen abyss. Frosted tin stars stood out against a frostbound sky. Who among these doomed men could have understood that for millions of Germans these were the first hours, after ten years of complete inhumanity, of a slow return to human life?"

😭 No words.