Maman, What Are We Called Now? Quotes

“The conscience of the civilised world--what is that? What does it mean? Is there irony in the words? Perhaps not, or, if there is, we are all accountable. Perhaps we should not always lay the blame elsewhere, on others--General de Gaulle, Anthony Eden, the Allied Armies, President Roosevelt. It's too easy. The conscience of the civilised world belongs to everyone, it's your conscience and mine. We are all responsible. Human beings are responsible for one another and they must be answerable not only for the things they have done but also for the things they have not done, not only for the things they have thought about but also for those they have failed to think about. History is made up of an infinite series of links, a whole network of responsibilities.”
― Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, Maman, What Are We Called Now?

“It's up to us to fill these children's lives. It's up to us to help them understand the world they live in, to show them those things which are base and harsh, but also those things which are fine; they will meet cruel indifference but they will also meet with kindness and love; our job is to help them accept the human condition in its entirety. We owe them this support. It's not a gift, but restitution, not charity, but justice...We will restore their hope, because they are our only hope in a world in which we have failed.”
― Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, Maman, What Are We Called Now?

“Everything is connected. Humanity is bound together. All crimes are collective. Desperately concerned as we are for our own deportees over there, whose fate haunts our days and nights, we must never forget the horror of every torched house, the tragedy of every hostage shot, or the fear of every naked victim shivering in the cold.
In the words of the great poet John Donne, '...never send to know/For whom the bell tolls/It tolls for thee.”
― Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, Maman, What Are We Called Now?

“It's easy to appear indignant in the face of the crimes committed by these brutes, to exclaim that 'these people are monsters', and then go back home for a peaceful dinner and sleep with a clear conscience. For there to have been that many monsters, there must have been something unusually propitious for the gestation and growth of monsters, something complex which exists at some level in all of us, and in which each and every one played a part. Across the entire German nation Nazism produced a strange desire to destroy their world and, in a sort of collective intoxication, bordering on madness, to allow another to arise in its place, a world of death, a dark repugnant bloody and sadistic medieval world.”
― Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, Maman, What Are We Called Now?

“Will my friends protect me from my ancestors?”
― Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, Maman, What Are We Called Now?