My Real Name Is Hanna Quotes

“I dream of a day when we will no longer need Holocaust stories to remind us to be kind to each other, and to be watchful of those who aren’t.”
― Tara Lynn Masih, My Real Name Is Hanna

“I want to have that feeling again that I’d felt in the forest, when I heard the Long-eared owl bark its presence, letting me know I wasn’t alone and that something or someone greater was watching out for me.”
― Tara Lynn Masih, My Real Name Is Hanna

“When someone gives up his or her life for you, they are always part of you.”
― Tara Lynn Masih, My Real Name Is Hanna

“We will never know what became of him. It is a burden I will carry for the rest of my life. I have nightmares. I wake, sweating and shaking. It is he who haunts me. And smoke plumes rising from chimneys. And rapid-fire gunshots. And dark serpents. Why was he taken, and not me? I wonder. Am I allowed to be happy, even though he is gone?”
― Tara Lynn Masih, My Real Name Is Hanna

“It’s hard to keep the human spirit down for long, at least the spirit of those of us who have the instinct to survive.”
― Tara Lynn Masih, My Real Name Is Hanna

“Mama says the irony is that the Russians had once tried to eradicate us themselves, but now they would be our liberators, if they could make the Germans retreat.”
― Tara Lynn Masih, My Real Name Is Hanna

“How can the Germans not see our suffering? I think to myself, as I boil a new batch of leaves. How can they hurt people like Polina? Babies? What makes them so cut off from their humanity?”
― Tara Lynn Masih, My Real Name Is Hanna

“I forgot to blow him a kiss, Hanna. I have become so tired and forgetful,” is the last thing she says into the dark.”
― Tara Lynn Masih, My Real Name Is Hanna

“Papa puts an arm around her. “This is what those Nazis make us do, huh? Live like barbarians. But the best revenge, my Eva, is just that—to live.…”
― Tara Lynn Masih, My Real Name Is Hanna

“the Ukrainian shopkeepers make us pay in Russian rubles, worth more now than our own Polish zlotych, or they make us trade instead of giving us the credit we are accustomed to receiving.”
― Tara Lynn Masih, My Real Name Is Hanna

“Papa says it is because Ukraine has no natural defenses—our land is too flat.”
― Tara Lynn Masih, My Real Name Is Hanna

“we do our children no good when we shield them from reality.”
― Tara Lynn Masih, My Real Name Is Hanna