A Lucky Child Quotes

“But what else could we do but hope? that, after all, is human nature.”
― Thomas Buergenthal, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

“.. . one cannot hope to protect mankind from crimes such as those that were visited upon us unless one struggles to brek the cycle of hatred and voilence that invariable leads to ever more suffering by innocent human beings.”
― Thomas Buergenthal, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

“That hope never left us, and it sustained us in the years to come, despite the fact that we had no good reason to expect our situation to improve.”
― Thomas Buergenthal, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

“If we humans can so easily wash the blood of our fellow humans off our hands, then what hope is there for sparing our future generations from a repeat of the genocides and mass killings of the past?”
― Thomas Buergenthal, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

“It seemed that we were condemned to be who we were, which was not a particularly good prospect.”
― Thomas Buergenthal, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

“while it was important not to forget what happened to us in the Holocaust, it was equally important not to hold the descendants of the perpetrators responsible for what was done to us, lest the cycle of hate and violence never end.”
― Thomas Buergenthal, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

“I doubt that we would have been able to preserve our sanity had we remained consumed by hatred for the rest of our lives. Many of our relatives and friends in America never understood what we meant when we tried to explain that, while it was important not to forget what happened to us in the Holocaust, it was equally important not to hold the descendants of the perpetrators responsible for what was done to us, lest the cycle of hate and violence never end.”
― Thomas Buergenthal, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

“It took me much longer to realize that one cannot hope to protect mankind from crimes such as those that were visited upon us unless one struggles to break the cycle of hatred and violence that invariably leads to ever more suffering by innocent human beings.”
― Thomas Buergenthal, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

“A big smile greeted me when I entered the director’s office. She is trying to trick me, I thought, and get me to talk. After asking me to sit down, the director began to question me about my parents. Did I remember my mother’s name? “Gerda,” I said. “What did you call her?” she asked next, and I replied, “Mutti.” “Do you know where she was born?” I answered that she was born in Göttingen. There were more questions, some also about my father and when I had last seen my parents, and so on. I answered as best I could, still wondering what this was all about. Then the director asked me whether I would recognize my mother if I saw her. “Of course!” I said, and now I was totally confused. “What is this woman driving at?” I wondered and was sure that she would eventually get to the real reason for my being in her office”
― Thomas Buergenthal, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

“The human mind is simply not able to grasp this terrible truth: a nation was transformed into a killing machine programmed to destroy millions of innocent people for no reason other than that they were different.”
― Thomas Buergenthal, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy