Endpapers Quotes

“It's a sobering fact, the historian Timothy Snyder points out, that 'cultures of memory are organized by round numbers, intervals of ten; but somehow the remembrance of the dead is easier when the numbers are not round, when the final digit is not a zero.”
― Alexander Wolff, Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape and Home

“And agents of Customs and Border Protection now warehoused would-be asylees in flight from violence, even separating children from their parents — and to make that easier, sometimes telling families that the child needed to be taken away "for a bath." To be sure, this wasn't comfortable to what the Nazis began to do in 1933. But by the light of American norms, it was unprecedented and took place under cover of falsehoods, insults, stunts, and gaslighting from the president and some of his supporters that echo darker times. Kafka died before the Nazis came to power, but he knew. "Evil," he wrote, "is whatever distracts.”
― Alexander Wolff, Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home

“But when the wheel next turns, it could turn in the devil’s own direction. That’s why we put our shoulder to it.”
― Alexander Wolff, Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape and Home

“Rightist populism is indeed on the march around Europe and the globe. But as the country most attuned to its dangers, Germany can make a claim as early-warning system.”
― Alexander Wolff, Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape and Home

“From now on you belong to the Führer!" German boys were told upon induction into the Hitler Youth. As Hitler once said, “I want no intellectual education. Knowledge will spoil the young for me. It is self-control they must learn; it is the fear of death they must conquer; this is what creates true freedom, creativity and maturity."

And prepares them to accept anything.”
― Alexander Wolff, Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home

“The reluctance of so many of today's Germans to court pity for their ancestors’ suffering, to invoke the allied bombings and postwar expulsions, is a kind of tacit acknowledgment of how many knew of the Nazi atrocities at the time.”
― Alexander Wolff, Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home

“Refugees trying to get out of France might have been trapped in one of Kafka's stories. They needed a "safe conduct" pass to cross territory under Vichy control. They needed a French exit visa, which the collaborationist weren't granting to Jews or anyone likely to be sought by the Gestapo. They needed transit visas for every sovereign waystation between origin and ultimate destination. And of course there was the holy grail, the US entrance visa. To secure any one document seem contingent on 1st having all others in hand.”
― Alexander Wolff, Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape and Home

“Germans of Jewish descent accounted for an outsize portion of the culture for which the nation would earn renown.”
― Alexander Wolff, Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape and Home