The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz Quotes

“It took strength of character to share and love in a world where selfishness and hate were common currency”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

“newspaper had a value in the camp, and it had to be said that wiping the arses of Jews was as good a use for the Beobachter as one could imagine”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

“No matter what occurred in the world, no matter how near danger might be, life went on, and what could one do but live it?”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

“In their own way, the Hungarian troops were as brutal as the SS. Most of the officers were well groomed, with pomaded hair, and had instilled in their mostly illiterate men an anti-Semitic fascist ideology that was on par with anything the SS could provide. They were callous and apt to shoot inmates for entertainment. Their main duty was to protect the kitchens, and they would stand in the square between the barracks taking shots at the prisoners foraging for scraps, killing dozens of them.9 Some retained a mystic devotion to the Nazi cause. One told a Jewish woman that he regretted the work of exterminating her people remained incomplete, telling her that Hitler would surely return, “and again we shall fight side by side.”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

“Nazism could no more be great than a strutting actor in a gilt cardboard crown could be a king.”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

“everything, misery”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

“The United States recalled its ambassador from Berlin in protest,7 the president declaring that the news “has profoundly affected the American people . . . I had difficulty believing that such things could occur in the 20th century.”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

“The Stair of Death was the epitome of SS thinking — why install a more efficient mechanical conveyor when criminal and Jewish labour was so cheap and the process so satisfyingly punishing?”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz

“Es”
― Jeremy Dronfield, Der Junge, der seinem Vater nach Auschwitz folgte: Eine wahre Geschichte

“The German press jeered at the hypocrisy of a world which made so much indignant noise about the supposedly pitiful plight of the Jews but did little or nothing to help.”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

“The suddenness with which genteel Vienna had turned was breathtaking – like tearing the soft, comfortable fabric of a familiar couch to reveal sharp springs and nails beneath.”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

“Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps [2015]; Cesarani, Final Solution; Laurence Rees, The Holocaust: A New History [2017].”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

“They and their descendants spread and multiplied, perpetuating through the generations the love and unity that had helped them through the darkest of times. They took their past with them, understanding that the living must gather the memories of the dead and carry them into the safety of the future.”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

“Staten Island”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

“Jews made up less than a fifth of Buchenwald’s prisoner population.14 There were criminals, Roma, Poles, Catholic and Lutheran clergy, and homosexuals, but by far the largest number were political prisoners—mostly communists and socialists.”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

“Yet only through solidarity and kindness could people stay alive for any length of time.”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

“The Nazis were louder, growing bolder, and most of them were youths, empty of life experience and pumped full of ideology.”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

“Gustav was thankful for the consolation of having Fritz by his side through these hours.”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

“With a whole class marked as enemies of the people, and the chance of an instant profit, friend had turned on friend without hesitation or qualm.”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

“The playwright Carl Zuckmayer wrote that ‘The netherworld had opened its portals and spewed out its basest, most horrid, and filthiest spirits … What was being unleashed here was the revolt of envy; malevolence; bitterness; blind, vicious vengefulness.’15 A British journalist who witnessed it called the procession ‘an indescribable witches’ sabbath’.16”
― Jeremy Dronfield, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz