A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them Quotes

“Ravensbrück was built for 3000 prisoners. At its height it held 35,000, 30,000 of whom were killed here. From the beginning, the SS did not want women with children in the camp; but as more and more territory was overrun, the camp swelled. After the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, there were hundreds of pregnant women deported here. Some are forced to abort; as numbers grow, women give birth and the babies are taken to a ‘hospital’ where they are slowly starved to death. The crematorium worked nonstop. Ash piles were dumped into the nearby lake as the Russians closed in. When the camp was overrun by the Red Army, 2000 women and 2000 men, mostly too infirm to be death-marched out of the camp, are found. Here”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“But you can’t just talk about the history, the chronology. To really try to understand, one has to know the stories of the individuals who were here. We need the individuals to speak to us. And then, we need to give them the voice that was taken from them.”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“Evil Happens When Good Men Do Nothing.”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“People did these unspeakable acts to other people. But the ‘monster’ myth is just that. I suppose it is one way of coping with the unthinkable. Let the perpetrators off the hook, in a sense, labeling them ‘monsters,’ not humans capable of deeply evil deeds, and move on. But to me, it kind of absolves them of something. They are not ‘human,’ after all, so what does one expect of them?”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“In studying the Holocaust together, we have plumbed the depths of the abyss that humanity is capable of, but not because of a fascination with evil and death; rather, it is because of the opposite, because of our commitment to humanity.”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“Evil Happens When Good Men Do Nothing”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“One by one western democracies were rolled up on German terms; Denmark and Norway in April and the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France in May and June of 1940. The United States, Canada, and Australia had formidable immigration barriers in place,”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“Farewell Warsaw, the city of joy and anguish, we shall never return! You stood uncaring when we cried to you for help in our despair. I hate you, you let a third of your inhabitants die before your eyes, without a word of protest against that terrible injustice! The ghetto was lit from above by the bright summer sun, but darkness, the smell of burning, and stench of corpses reigned inside. [*]”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“Finally we reach the end of the camp where the kitchens stood. A round concrete ring rises out of the earth, maybe 6 feet in diameter. Someone finally speaks and asks Alicja what it was. A giant flowerpot. It was for flowers. She tells us also that they were placed near the entrances of the gas chambers. Flowers at the gas chambers.   We”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“The United States, Canada, and Australia had formidable immigration barriers in place, and while the British had admitted 80,000 Jewish refugees, all of that essentially ended after the declaration of war.[33] British-controlled Palestine also began to turn back ships of Jewish immigrants, a policy they would continue all throughout the war and beyond, sticking to strict Jewish immigration quotas to appease the non-Jewish residents there.”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“The United States proclaimed its neutrality, but the president authorized moderate increases in the American armed forces; frighteningly, it had recently lagged behind Bulgaria as the 18th placeholder for the largest army in the world.[32]”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“A few of them hid Jews for large sums of money; these were mostly people connected to socialist activities and the left wing parties. Many devout Christians and religious scholars did so without taking money, out of true nobility of spirit.”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“We move on to the site of the gas chambers. Even the ‘bath house’ has a Star of David, a Hebrew inscription that reads, ‘This is the gate through which the righteous pass.’ Once inside, the doors are sealed, and a captured Soviet T-34 tank engine is started, pumping choking carbon monoxide into the chamber. After a quarter-hour, the people would be dead.”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“In the beginning, stores sold food smuggled into the ghetto, where one could buy anything—even eggs and milk. And outside lurk the snatchers, girls and boys in rags with feverish eyes, lying in wait for people leaving the store, grabbing their food and at once plunging their teeth into it, right through the wrapping paper. People crowd around, kicking and shouting, but the child does not care as long as there is food, no matter what it is. The coffee houses are full of smartly dressed women, wearing elegant pre-war hats. There are also rich smugglers, the new ghetto aristocracy, and all kinds of people getting rich at others’ expense; in front of the houses on the sidewalks lay human skeletons covered by newspapers. Winter,”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“Before World War II, Warsaw was the epicenter of Jewish life and culture in Poland; 350,000 Jews made up its prewar population. This vibrant Jewish community was the largest in both Poland and Europe, and was the second largest in the world, second only to New York City.[24] Autumn,”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“In October, 1942, the order was given to exhume the bodies and incinerate them on mass pyres using railroad rails as makeshift grills. The murderers also employed a bone crushing machine to pulverize the evidence, and plowed over all traces of the camp after its dismantling in the spring of 1943.[23]  ”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“In the 15th and 16th centuries, Poland was the center of European Jewish life. In fact, at the end of the 18th century, 75% of the world’s Jews lived in the former Galicia, where we are, once part of Poland, Ukraine and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Still, in most places in Poland there is nothing left of this heritage; out of what was once millions, today only between 12,000 and 14,000 Jews call Poland home.”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“later we heard that the nuns from this convent took those Jewish children and gave them to the Germans, and no one survived. [But”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“And this all brings to mind another incident that took place as the deportations from Berlin were being orchestrated, little known but highly illuminating and important. Between February 27 and March 6, 1943, a large group non-Jewish German women publicly protested in the cold for the release of nearly 2,000 Jews—their husbands and the male children of these ‘mixed marriages’. These couples had held special ‘exemptions’ from the ongoing racial laws, tabled even at the Wannsee Conference, but with the defeat at Stalingrad, these male Jews were ordered to be rounded up. Outside of the site of their incarceration at Rosenstrasse 2–4 in Berlin, despite being threatened with lethal force, the women and children gathered here chanted and yelled in the belief that their loved ones were to be deported to suffer the same fate as those other Jews shipped to the East. News of the protest spread, and the regime did not carry out its threat and the men were eventually released (though most were picked up again to work in labor camps).[21] It was the only German public protest against deportation of Jews, and not one of the protesters was shot. No government likes bad ‘PR’, even the Nazis at home, especially as the tables begin to turn on the war front. I”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“Did anyone speak out? After a sermon denouncing the T–4 program by Catholic Archbishop Clemens Von Galen in August 1941 was publicized, Hitler quietly ordered a suspension of the gassing program, though valuable lessons in mass murder had been learned. The killing of children and other undesirables resumed a year later under more decentralized circumstances, with perhaps 200,000 killed before the end of the war.[16] Later,”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“Legislation unfolds incrementally at first. A one-day boycott of Jewish business is proclaimed. Non-Aryan[*] civil servants are forcibly retired. Kosher butchering is forbidden by law. Non-Aryan children find it harder to be admitted to schools and universities. Jewish newspapers can no longer be sold in the streets. At”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“My aunt sat with me under the wheels and took out a little notebook that contained the names and addresses of our relatives in America. She told me to learn all of this by heart because you never know who the bullet will hit, and when the war would end, I should contact these relatives and ask them to take me in. I listened to her and learned everything by heart. Even today, I remember some of these names and addresses. Leslie”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“She had already rehearsed me several times on what I should do and say in case I survived and she did not. I had to repeat my name and my parents' name and our address at home as identification information I already knew. As a further safety measure, she introduced me to other women who would look after me should she die—a reciprocal arrangement made by a couple of mothers who agreed to become guardians of each other's children.”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them

“Mourners leave notes here. In this small room of reflection and remembrance, the Queen of England herself paid her first and only visit to a concentration camp, seventy years after the liberation. Here she found a handwritten lament: If I could live my life again, I would find you sooner.  ”
― Matthew A. Rozell, A Train Near Magdeburg―The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them