Dachau Concentration Camp Survivors Quotes

When I was a teenager I took freedom for granted until I got through the army and saw what the Nazis had done in Germany. Then I realized that freedom isn't automatic; it has a price.

World War II was a justified and necessary war. Last year I met five survivors of Auschwitz concentration camp. The things that happened to those people should never have happened to any human being.

- Ed Tipper ~ Marcus Brotherton

To deny the reported six million (approximately) Jews who died, or the 11 million people in total, is to ignore all the eyewitness accounts from Holocaust survivors, the non-Jewish witnesses of the millions who died the open-air massacres around Europe, the concentration camp guards, Nazi officers who admitted to gassings and other related crimes immediately after WW2, and the universal agreement of all mainstream historians who have studied this historical event inside out – not to mention every single scientist who has ever analyzed forensic evidence retrieved from the Nazi genocide. Not even the most corrupt courtroom on Earth could ignore this much evidence – for collectively these confirmations of the Holocaust equate to irrefutable proof that the reported death toll is indeed correct. It is possibly the most well-documented crime of the 20th Century, but remember for religious extremists, Nazi apologists or other anti-Semites it would never matter how much evidence you put in front of them. They would always deny the Holocaust because to admit the event occurred would be to stop believing the Jews are inferior to them. It would also require such bigots to admit the very uncomfortable truth to themselves: that their 'own kind' did these despicable things to the Jewish people. ~ James Morcan

THIS BOOK DOES not claim to be an account of facts and events but of personal experiences, experiences which millions of prisoners have suffered time and again. It is the inside story of a concentration camp, told by one of its survivors. This tale is not concerned with the great horrors, which have already been described often enough (though less often believed), but with the multitude of small torments. In other words, it will try to answer this question: How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner? ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Consider also the special word they used: survivor. Something new. As long as they didn't have to say human being. It used to be refugee, but by now there was no such creature, no more refugees, only survivors. A name like a number
counted apart from the ordinary swarm. Blue digits on the arm, what difference? They don't call you a woman anyhow. Survivor. Even when your bones get melted into the grains of the earth, still they'll forget human being. Survivor and survivor and survivor; always and always. Who made up these words, parasites on the throat of suffering! ~ Cynthia Ozick

Dymphna's talk of concentration camp survivors reminds you that you are super-privileged and self-absorbed and that really your suffering doesn't mean much by comparison.
'You have to choose how you respond to your own suffering. Everyone has to find meaning.'
'Everyone is full of shit,' you want to say, but you don't. You are learning not to say such things. This is what is meant by well-adjusted. ~ Suzanne Scanlon

If writing with a goal - whether it be evangelistic, apologetic, or didactic - implies propaganda, then all recorded history is propaganda ... a work shouldn't be dismissed simply because of the strong convictions of the writer. Should we discount the facticity or reliability of the accounts of Nazi concentration camp survivors simply because they passionately recount their story? ~ Paul Copan

Within a decade or two, all Holocaust survivors will likely have passed away so a ticking clock is in effect in this battle between the truth and lies. Keep in mind even those survivors born in a concentration camp during WW2 would be at least 71 years-of-age when this book (the one you are reading now) was released. Those survivors old enough to clearly recall the events of that nightmare will, of course, be older and have much less time left. As the memory of the Holocaust begins to fade away, it will become easier to deny the genocide even occurred unless those of us who are truthseekers are able to embrace the memory of the genocide and educate others do the same. What's needed in this propaganda war is for the true stories of Holocaust survivors – as well as those of the Nazi perpetrators, their associates and others who witnessed the genocide – to be told loudly and clearly so that there will never, ever be room for doubt in generations to come. After all, nothing is more powerful, credible or damning than eyewitness accounts. ~ James Morcan

Adeline is Battered & Threatened

Not knowing the title of this bureaucrat, I addressed him incorrectly as Meine Herrschaften. With this silly fabricated title, I simply tried to explain to him that the corporal was a brave Frontsoldat. My efforts were in vain since he was intent on finding out the corporal's name, and my stalling only made matters worse. "What's his name?" he shouted again and again, this time hitting my breasts and punching me in the stomach, which caused me to vomit all over the floor. It didn't matter to him that my husband was a German soldier fighting for das Vaterland. He continued to beat me and threatened to put me into the terrible prison camp at Schirmeck. Having passed by there recently, the crying and moaning sounds from inside the gates of this prison were still very vivid in my mind. He reached for his telephone and said, "With one call you'll be there if you don't answer me!" "Please, I won't be able to live with myself if I'm the cause of an innocent person's death," I sobbed. I remember him saying, "I remember you! You're the woman from Bischoffsheim who helped with the kindergarten class and did the art work there. You have two little girls, don't you?" How could this man know so much about me? He continued his threats by saying that he would beat my little girls at 3 o'clock every afternoon in the Village center, until I gave him the names he wanted. I formed a mental image of this cruel act, however in spite of this, I firm ~ Hank Bracker

When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political structure, of these United States protects any American from arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a cellar. ~ Rose Wilder Lane

Despite the madness of war, we lived for a world that would be different. For a better world to come when all this is over. And perhaps even our being here is a step towards that world. Do you really think that, without the hope that such a world is possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for one day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity. It is hope that breaks down family ties, makes mothers renounce their children, or wives sell their bodies for bread, or husbands kill. It is hope that compels man to hold on to one more day of life, because that day may be the day of liberation. Ah, and not even the hope for a different, better world, but simply for life, a life of peace and rest. Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in the war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers. ~ Tadeusz Borowski

Much that is terrible we do not know. Much that is beautiful we shall still discover. Let's sail till we come to the edge. ~ Thomas M. Disch

There were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on. ~ Martha Gellhorn

Taran. We go down fighting. ~ Elizabeth Wein

I want to make my contribution to humanity so that there will be no more Auschwitzes. Children who are born wanted and are given love and attention will not build concentration camps. ~ Henry Morgentaler

This time of year, the purple blooms were busy with life- not just the bees, but butterflies and ladybugs, skippers and emerald-toned beetles, flitting hummingbirds and sapphire dragonflies. The sun-warmed sweet haze of the blossoms filled the air.
"When I was a kid," said Isabel, "I used to capture butterflies, but I was afraid of the bees. I'm getting over that, though." The bees softly rose and hovered over the flowers, their steady hum oddly soothing. The quiet buzzing was the soundtrack of her girlhood summers. Even now, she could close her eyes and remember her walks with Bubbie, and how they would net a monarch or swallowtail butterfly, studying the creature in a big clear jar before setting it free again. They always set them free.
As she watched the activity in the hedge, a memory floated up from the past- Bubbie, gently explaining to Isabel why they needed to open the jar. "No creature should ever be trapped against its will," she used to say. "It will ruin itself, just trying to escape." As a survivor of a concentration camp, Bubbie only ever spoke of the experience in the most oblique of terms. ~ Susan Wiggs

Dachau-the significance of this name will never be erased from German history. It stands for all concentration camps which the Nazis established in their territory. ~ Eugen Kogon

The camp inmate was frightened of making decisions and of taking any sort of initiative whatsoever. This was the result of a strong feeling that fate was one's master, and that one must not try to influence it in any way, but instead let it take its own course. In addition, there was a great apathy, which contributed in no small part to the feelings of the prisoner. at times, lightning decisions had to be made, decisions which spelled life or death. The prisoner would have preferred to let fate make the choice for him. This escape from commitment was most apparent when a prisoner had to make the decision for or against an escape attempt. In those minutes in which he had to make up his mind-and it was always a question of minutes-he suffered the tortures of Hell. Should he make the attempt to flee? Should he take the risk? ~ Viktor E. Frankl

You know, it set you at war with yourself. ~ Elizabeth Wein

Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat ax. All that is subtle in human psychology and in the structure of society (which is even more complex), all of this is reduced to crude economic processes. The whole created being - man - is reduced to matter. It is characteristic that Communism is so devoid of arguments that it has none to advance against its opponents in our Communist countries. It lacks arguments and hence there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp, and insane asylums with forced confinement. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

NEGRO :; Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed not by its residents Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis. ~ John Brunner

In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear. And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say, picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, "This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman." Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being. ~ George Orwell

Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts. ~ Milan Kundera

There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it. ~ Aldous Huxley

Those of us directed towards the right were lined up in threes with much shooting and beating. I was in the first row, at the platform's edge. Suddenly, we see a group of older women and women with children nearing the road, under the platform. In the first row I see my mother supported on both sides by two friends. She too becomes aware of me. And out of the throat of this reticent, soft-spoken woman who I don't remember ever raising her voice, breaks out a terrible, desperate, piercingly loud, howling shout: 'GYURIKA!!! ~ Azriel Feuerstein

We are laying the foundation for some new, monstrous civilization. Only now do I realize what price was paid for building the ancient civilizations. The Egyptian pyramids, the temples and Greek statues - what a hideous crime they were! How much blood must have poured on to the Roman roads, the bulwarks, and the city walls. Antiquity - the tremendous concentration camp where the slave was branded on the forehead by his master, and crucified for trying to escape! Antiquity - the conspiracy of the free men against the slaves!
.... If the Germans win the war, what will the world know about us? They will erect huge buildings, highways, factories, soaring monuments. Our hands will be placed under every brick, and our backs will carry the steel rails and the slabs of concrete. They will kill off our families, our sick, our aged. They will murder our children.
And we shall be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the poets, the jurists, the philosophers, the priests. They will produce their own beauty, virtue, and truth. They will produce religion. ~ Tadeusz Borowski

Like Nazi concentration camps, labour camps in North Korea use confinement, hunger and fear to create a kind of Skinner box: a closed, closely regulated chamber in which guards assert absolute control over prisoners. Yet while Auschwitz existed for only three years, Camp 14 is a fifty-year-old Skinner box, an ongoing longitudinal experiment in repression and mind control in which guards breed prisoners whom they control, isolate and pit against each other from birth. ~ Blaine Harden

Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings. ~ Graham Greene

Prisons are like the concentration camps of our time. So many go in and never come out, and primarily they're black and Latino. ~ Lisa Bonet

It does not take the constant barrage of bourgeois propaganda to reinforce the thinking among native-born white male workers that a woman, black, or migrant worker is a threat to his job security and wages. He already knows the competitive conditions of his class and the means by which his job and his wages are to be secured. He is King Rat, the guy who is going to survive in the middle of an all-sided struggle no matter how conditions deteriorate for the class as a whole in the open-air concentration camp of class society. His measure of success is not how he is doing in absolute terms, but how he is doing relative to other wage slaves. ~ Anonymous

If you only knew, all of you, how the camp remains in all our minds, and will until we die. ~ Marceline Loridan-Ivens

The bar was manned, or should I say womanned by a skeletal heroin chic concentration camp survivor with an elaborate set of tattoos and an incredibly bizarre set of piercings. I swear, if women continue to insist on making their selves this unattractive I'm going to swear off sex permanently. ~ Randall Moore

I am not allowed to be afraid. My mother made me like that. As a child, if I was afraid of the dark, she would lock me in the closet. Things like this. And she would talk about the time she spent in the concentration camp, but not about being afraid, only about the good side of it. ~ Diane Von Furstenberg

You must understand that at that time, the concentration camps were prisons where opponents of the Nazi regime were detained. Von Schuschnigg was in a concentration camp; so was Bruno Bettelheim for a time. The inmates were made to work at hard labor and lived in dreadful conditions, but they often came back from these places. Not until the 1940s did the words "concentration camp" come to stand for monstrous cruelty and almost certain death. Nobody even imagined there would one day be a death camp like Auschwitz. ~ Edith Hahn Beer

It is as heroic as he makes it sound. "Why have I never heard anything about all this - and not just from you? Sophie never said a word. Hell, I didn't even know that people escaped over the mountains or that there was a concentration camp just for women who resisted the Nazis." "Men tell stories," I say. It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. "Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over. Your sister was as desperate to forget it as I was. Maybe that was another mistake I made - letting her forget. Maybe we should have talked about it. ~ Kristin Hannah

Auschwitz?! That is a name I had heard before. There is not much time for thinking. It had been raining here not so long ago. The asphalt of the wet, wide platform reflects the light of the high lighting-poles. The row of armed SS men competes in howling with their dogs they hold on leashes ~ Azriel Feuerstein

I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp. ~ Imre Kertesz

Guano-mo, huh? The neo-Nazi concentration camp ~ Kenneth Eade

In January 1951, high commissioner of occupied Germany John McCloy announced that only five of the 15 death sentences from the Nuremberg judgments would be carried out. He then reduced the sentences of 64 out of the remaining 74 war criminals. One third of these were to be released immediately. He also reduced the sentences of all remaining convicted doctors who had experimented on concentration camp inmates. McCloy had sat in Adolf Hitler's box at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. ~ Carol Rutz

The greatest proof of power is the mass grave, the camp as a field of the dead. However, total power here cancels itself. Death is the absolute antisocial fact. For that reason, the absolute power to kill can never become total. In order to escape this dilemma, it constantly searches out new victims, defining new groups of opponents. Everyone is on terror's proscription list - extended to its logical conclusion, all of humankind. ~ Wolfgang Sofsky

It's not unreal to me yet, though it might get that way soon. It still feels very real. And not even horrible
the dead are just the dead. I am convinced that the living people they once were would have been proud of their protective bodies hoodwinking their murderers to save someone else. [..]
But it's not civilized. There is something indecent about it
really foully indecent. The civilized Rose-person in me, who still seems to exist beneath the layers of filth, knows this. [..]
I have become so indifferent about the dead. ~ Elizabeth Wein

The thing about World War II is that everyone knows about the concentration camps in Europe - in Nazi Germany and Poland and Auschwitz and the other camps - but, no one really talks about the camps that were here in the United States. ~ Lea Salonga

We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell. ~ Pablo Picasso

Cohen was on his knees taking a picture of a passing cloud, an unremarkable cirrus shaped as if it were sketched expressly for a meteorology textbook, its immortality assured only through the wild Polish luck of having passed the former concentration camp on the day of Cohen's visit. ~ Gary Shteyngart

The War broke out, and our city and country became a part of Hitler's Imperium. For five and a half years we lived in a dimension completely different from that which any literature or experience could have led us to know. What we beheld surpassed the most daring and the most macabre imagination. Descriptions of horrors known to us of old now made us smile at their naivete. German rule in Eu­rope was ruthless, but nowhere so ruthless as in the East, for the East was populated by races which, according to the doctrines of National Socialism, were either to be utterly eradicated or else used for heavy physical labor. The events we were forced to partici­pate in resulted from the effort to put these doctrines into practice.
Still we lived; and since we were writers, we tried to write. True, from time to time one of us dropped out, shipped off to a concentration camp or shot. There was no help for this. We were like people marooned on a dissolving floe of ice; we dared not think of the moment when it would melt away. ~ Czesław Miłosz

Hitler may have lost the war on the battlefield, but he ended up winning something too," says Marek Halter, "because man in the twentieth century created the concentration camp and revived torture and taught his fellow men that it is possible to close their eyes to the misfortunes of others." Perhaps he is right: There are abandoned children, massacred civilians, innocent people imprisoned, lonely old people, drunks in the gutter, madmen in power. But perhaps he isn't right at all, for there are also Warriors of the Light. And Warriors of the Light never accept what is unacceptable. ~ Paulo Coelho

Keep your elbows in!" Sturmhond berated Mal. "Stop flapping them like some kind of chicken."
Mal let out a disturbingly convincing cluck.
Tamar raised a brow. "Your friend seems to be enjoying himself."
I shrugged. "Mal's always been like that. You could drop him in a camp full of Fjerdan assassins, and he'd come out carried on their shoulders. He just blooms wherever he's planted."
"And you?"
"I'm more of a weed," I said drily.
Tamar grinned. In combat, she was cold and silent fire, but when she wasn't fighting, her smiles came easily. "I like weeds," said said, pushing herself off from the railing and gathering her scattered lengths of rope. "They're survivors. ~ Leigh Bardugo

So many of my sisters are so completely unaware of who the real criminals and dogs are. They blame themselves for being hungry; they hate themselves for surviving the best way they know how, to see so much fear, doubt, hurt, and self hatred is the most painful part of being in this concentration camp. "Anyway, in spite of all, i feel a breeze behind my neck, turning to a hurricane and when i take a deep breath I can smell freedom ~ Assata Shakur

I believe all suffering contains at least the opportunity for good," came his response, "but not everyone actualizes that potential. Not all of us learn and benefit from suffering; that's where free will comes in. One prisoner in a concentration camp will react quite differently from another, because of the choice each one makes to respond to the environment. ~ Lee Strobel