Safe Passage Quotes

“Then one woman looked directly at her husband. "Is our place gone?"
"I'm afraid so, girl," he said. "There isn't much left up there. But we're alive. We're all lucky to be alive. We'd have been dead if we'd stayed up above."
"Oh, what a mercy we didn't!" she exclaimed. "How lucky we are!"
Incredible though it sounds, within a few moments, a whole lot of people were congratulating each other on their extraordinary good fortune in only having lost all their worldy posessions.”
― Ida Cook, Safe Passage

“Presently someone is going to discover how to grow an instant tree. It won't be much like the tree that has taken years and years to mature, but it will satisfy quite a number of people who will, incidentally, be rather huffy if you talk about the superiority of the real thing.”
― Ida Cook, Safe Passage

“In the welter of horror and haste that was Dunkirk, someone paused to put the hands of the two dead boys together, so that even in their death, they were not divided. “Such good boys they was,” the old woman repeated sorrowfully. “But, there, miss,” she added more cheerfully, “we must all make sacrifices in these days, mustn’t we?” I said, I hope with some humility, that we must. And I have often wondered since if the brotherhood of man has ever been more movingly described than in those words, “We did the best we could. We left them side by side, with their hands touching.”
― Ida Cook, The Bravest Voices: A Memoir of Two Sisters' Heroism During the Nazi Era