The Boy Between Worlds Quotes

“He liked to introduce himself to his new victims with: “I am Kees Kaptein, the greatest Jew crusher in the Netherlands!”
― Annejet van der Zijl, The Boy Between Worlds

“March 1, 1943, about one year after the Wannsee Conference, when the Entjudung, the “Aryanization” of Holland, was virtually complete.”
― Annejet van der Zijl, The Boy Between Worlds

“Imagine that your own children, who you brought into the world, just walk past you. It’s enough to make anybody crazy.”
― Annejet van der Zijl, The Boy Between Worlds

“They knew where they were going by then—Ravensbrück, the concentration camp set up by Himmler in 1938 for all the women who did not fit the Aryan Kinder-Küche-Kirche ideal: criminals, prostitutes, Roma, and, in recent years, increasing numbers of Resistance fighters from all over Europe.”
― Annejet van der Zijl, The Boy Between Worlds

“Without protest, officers in The Hague supervised the transport of Jewish prisoners, and some even agreed to work as guards in Westerbork.”
― Annejet van der Zijl, The Boy Between Worlds

“On July 14, 1942, the first trains left for Westerbork in Drenthe.”
― Annejet van der Zijl, The Boy Between Worlds

“Had the German leader been a full-blooded politician, he could have chosen to consolidate his position and offer his people—who had followed him with doglike devotion into his wars—a period of peace. But Hitler’s desire to conquer was so overpowering that he could not stop at defeat. Being denied his Russian victory seemed to spoil the game for him, and from that point on he was after total Armageddon. The first victim would be the country he had specifically chosen for his empire, which had then dared to disappoint him. On November 27, he announced in a radio address: “If the German people are no longer strong enough and prepared to sacrifice their blood for their existence, then they shall pass away and be destroyed by another, stronger power . . . and then I will not weep for the German people.”
― Annejet van der Zijl, The Boy Between Worlds

“In general, they weren’t particularly intelligent and thus easily influenced, and thanks to the unusual wartime circumstances, they suddenly found themselves wielding a power they had never had before.”
― Annejet van der Zijl, The Boy Between Worlds

“In assessing what happened in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation, later generations were quick to draw hard lines between good and evil, but they hadn’t experienced the war and all its ambiguity firsthand, and it was all too easy to see things as black or white. But those who had lived through it knew better: only the dead were blameless. All survivors had something to feel guilty about—if only the mere fact that they were still alive while so many others, some of whom had surely been better, braver, more deserving than they, were not.”
― Annejet van der Zijl, The Boy Between Worlds

“would be”
― Annejet van der Zijl, The Boy Between Worlds

“There was, for example, one group in Rotterdam that refused to help Jewish people in any way, shape, or form, because they believed that the Jews had brought this misery on themselves by crucifying Christ.”
― Annejet van der Zijl, The Boy Between Worlds