Belsen Quotes

The flag of radicalism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen ~ Tony Benn

Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen physical or psychological wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like. ~ Sylvia Plath

It is painful to recall a past intensity, to estimate your distance from the Belsen heap, to make your peace with numbers. Just to get up each morning is to make a kind of peace. ~ Leonard Cohen

How much kinder it would have been, to turn off, like an appliance. The gradual, drawn-out corruption of the body while its host was still trapped inside was a torture of a sort they would have contrived at Guantanamo, or Bergen-Belsen. Every old age was an Edgar Allan Poe story. ~ Lionel Shriver

The throbbing engines of the ship and its relentless passage onwards through the sea brought back to us the ever urgency of moving Time, and then we knew that neither they nor we would would ever find again on earth such happiness and full content of mind as all we had known in the Children's Hospital at Belsen Camp when the Devil had been banished and Love crowned king. ~ Robert Collis

For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely created a Belsen of our own. The method was impersonal, but the result was equally cruel and heartless. That, I am afraid, is a sickening truth. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The photographs of the inmates at Bergen-Belsen or Andersonville Prison or the bodies in the ditch at My Lai disturb us in a singular fashion because those instances of egregious human cruelty were committed for the most part by baptized Christians. ~ James Lee Burke

Look at the Germans, the most cultured and well mannered of people, and yet ... Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen. Given the same set of circumstances it could just as well have been the English, ~ Kate Atkinson

If seeing her an hour before her last
Weak cough into all blackness I could yet
Be held by chalk-white walls
- The Consumptive. Belsen 1945 ~ Mervyn Peake

Sly and reckless, compulsive and bold. The goat-god, with hoof and smile and hairy ears, satyr at the helm of the Play Pen. Love him, understand him, forgive him, lead him shyly to Freud, or Jesus. Or else take the contemporarily untenable position that evil, undiluted by any hint of childhood trauma, does exist in the world, exists for its own precise sake, the pustular bequest from the beast, as inexplicable as Belsen. ~ John D. MacDonald