World War 2 Quotes

I will be so glad for you to hear not the sounds of gunfire but the sounds of church bells, and of people working in peace. ~ Elizabeth Berg

Mussolini is quite humiliated because our troops have not moved a step forward. Even today they have not succeeded in advancing and have halted in front of the first French fortification which put up some resistance. ~ Galeazzo Ciano

The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

My name's Alis K. From now on you will be Willy. Come on, let's push the bicycles for a bit."

Ingrid aka 'Alis K'
The Informer ~ Steen Langstrup

Media was a battle ground. So was the internet. People began walking openly with their weapons, whether it was a gun or a camera. Drones were always skimming overhead, filming the violence of the second civil war of the United States. ~ Lindsay Anderson

May be you find out I could be useful getting people out of camps and prisons in Germany - just before they got shot. I should love to do it and I like to jump out of a plane even every day. ~ Christine Granville

Greed is empowered by knowledge, but we shouldn't be burning books or reject such knowledge, as what happened during the Inquisition and World War 2. We should instead share it and learn it. ~ Daniel Marques

No compromise is possible and the victory of the democracies can only be complete with the utter defeat of the war machines of Germany and Japan. ~ George C. Marshall

Air superiority is the ultimate expression of military power. ~ Winston Churchill

One of them was Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party. Fleeing the "Nazi regime has ruined German industry." And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, "What a fool ( Dummkopf ) I was! ~ William L. Shirer

There are two early "Holocaust" tales from the Talmud. Gittin 57b claums that four billion Jews were killed by the Romans in the city of Bethar. Gitting 58a claims that 16 million Jewish children were wrapped in scrolls and burned alive by the Romans.

-- Judaism's Strange Gods. page 51 ~ Michael A. Hoffman II

The limbs of a stand of birch tree hold up the forest's form like women's bones. This grove has a magnetic pull, beckoning toward a carpet of blue-green mosses where I long to lie on my back and sing into the leaves. But it is a place where bodies were stacked, and I don't want to make friends with trees that once hid the dead. ~ Vesper Stamper

Now comes the picture of mass defeat, the most awesome spectacle of the war. It is in the bent bodies of old women who poke among ruins seeking some miserable object that will link their lives with the old days. It is in the shamed darting eyes of the defeated. It is in the faces of the little boys who regard our triumphant columns with fear and fascination. And above all it is in the thousands of beaten, dusty soldiers who stream along the roads towards the stockades. Their feet clump wearily, mechanically, hopelessly on the still endless road of war. They move as haggard, gray masses, in which the individual had neither life nor meaning. It is impossible to see in these men the quality that made them stand up and fight like demons out of hell a few shorts months ago. ~ Audie Murphy

It was harder for the ones who were waiting, Annemarie knew. Less danger, perhaps, but more fear. ~ Lois Lowry

I don't really know; I'm not in the Operations Room, you see. All I do know is that the world has a Chief who was victorious when the powers of darkness struck at Him with everything they had. He has the plans today. The darkness won't last forever. There's a splendor beyond.
~Flying Officer George Dymory Ingleford, Enemy Brothers ~ Constance Savery

The cost of war is like an immeasurable tremor that knows no borders, its shockwaves reverberating across the world resulting in universal suffering. ~ Aysha Taryam

It is on this beautiful day that we celebrate the Fuhrers birthday and thank him for he is the only reason why Germany is still alive today ~ Joseph Goebbels

There are criminals everywhere these days, you know. One might end up missing the police! Who would have thought that possible?
The Maid
The Informer by Steen Langtrup ~ Steen Langstrup

Democracy alone, of all forms of government, enlists the full force of men's enlightened will. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

It is evil things that we will be fighting against-brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution-and against them I am certain that the right will prevail. ~ Neville Chamberlain

Sneaking out at night. You think you're so clever, but you're not. Either you're a saboteur, Johannes, or you've got a mistress.
The Reverend's wife, Grete
The Informer ~ Steen Langstrup

We will accept nothing less than full Victory! ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril. ~ Winston S. Churchill

For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles. He seemed no less engaging than Goethe's. ~ Albert Speer

That doesn't make him a hero. Our country is doomed, don't you see? Our fate is death, no matter whose hands we fall into. ~ Ruta Sepetys

Thieves and prostitutes. Our mothers were in that car, along with a teacher, a librarian, elderly people, and a newborn baby - thieves and prostitutes. ~ Ruta Sepetys

The gallantry and aggressive fighting spirit of the Russian soldiers command the American army's admiration. ~ George C. Marshall

From the start the proportion of asocials in the camp was about one-third of the total population, and throughout the first years prostitutes, homeless and 'work-shy' women continued to pour in through the gates. Overcrowding in the asocial blocks increased fast, order collapsed, and then followed squalor and disease.
Although we learn a lot about what the political prisoners thought of the asocials, we learn nothing of what the asocials thought of them. Unlike the political women, they left no memoirs. Speaking out after the war would mean revealing the reason for imprisonment in the first place, and incurring more shame. Had compensation been available they might have seen a reason to come forward, but none was offered.
The German associations set up after the war to help camp survivors were dominated by political prisoners. And whether they were based in the communist East or in the West, these bodies saw no reason to help 'asocial' survivors. Such prisoners had not been arrested as 'fighters' against the fascists, so whatever their suffering none of them qualified for financial or any other kind of help. Nor were the Western Allies interested in their fate. Although thousands of asocials died at Ravensbrück, not a single black- or green-triangle survivor was called upon to give evidence for the Hamburg War Crimes trials, or at any later trials.
As a result these women simply disappeared: the red-light districts they came from had been flattened by Allied ~ Sarah Helm

We know that enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people's freedom. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

It was so beautiful', he said. 'the Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. you've got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains ... we used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvellous place it would be to come to for a holiday. however terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if its beautiful. ~ Nevil Shute

Overriding all of them, however, was the memory of 1918, the belief that the Jews, wherever and whoever they might be, threatened to undermine the German war effort, by engaging in subversion, partisan activities, Communist resistance movements and much else besides. ~ Richard J. Evans

And at the end of the evening he and Dym had made plans, airy ambitious plans, of all that they would do after the war. Euphemia had laughed at the planners. "What boundless energy you have, Jacob!" she had said.
Jacob had turned - Tony could see the dark, curly head and sparkling eyes quite plainly - and smiled at her. "Madam," he had said, "if I had a thousand lives, I could fill them all. ~ Constance Savery

Earlier in the morning Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines had attacked eastward into the ruins of Shuri Castle and had raised the Confederate flag. When we learned that the flag of the Confederacy had been hoisted over the very heart and soul of Japanese resistance, all of us Southerners cheered loudly. The Yankees among us grumbled, and the Westerners didn't know what to do. Later we learned that the Stars and Stripes that had flown over Guadalcanal were raised over Shuri Castle, a fitting tribute to the men of the 1st Marine Division who had the honor of being first into the Japanese citadel. ~ Eugene B. Sledge

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima ... The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East. ~ Harry S. Truman

Which would your men rather be, tired, or dead? ~ Erwin Rommel

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

Kinship among nations is not determined in such measurements as proximity of size and age. Rather we should turn to those inner things - call them what you will - I mean those intangibles that are the real treasures free men possess. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

The whiskered goddess had two natures; as Sekhmet the lioness, she was a mighty queen of sun-fire and war, and a harbinger of raw spiritual powers. As Bast the cat, she was the gentle bringer of love and domestic joy. ~ Zita Steele

One part of him recoiled in instinctive horror at the daily waste, the inundation of destruction and death that inexorably assaulted the mind and heart; once again he saw the faculty depleted, he saw the haunted looks upon those who remained behind, and saw in those looks the slow death of the heart, the bitter attrition of feeling and care. ~ John Edward Williams

The plight of Jews in German-occupied Europe, which many people thought was at the heart of the war against the Axis, was not a chief concern of Roosevelt. Henry Feingold's research (The Politics of Rescue) shows that, while the Jews were being put in camps and the process of annihilation was beginning that would end in the horrifying extermination of 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews, Roosevelt failed to take steps that might have saved thousands of lives. He did not see it as a high priority; he left it to the State Department, and in the State Department anti-Semitism and a cold bureaucracy became obstacles to action.
Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over "inferior" races? The United States' armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old.
The Red Cross, with government approval, separated the blood donations of black and white. It was, ironically, a black physician named Charles Drew who developed the blood bank system. He was put in charge of the wartime donations, and then fired when he tried to end blood segregation. Despite the urgent need for wartime labor, blacks were still being discriminated against for jobs. A spok ~ Howard Zinn

In war, you win or lose, live or die - and the difference is just an eyelash. ~ Douglas MacArthur

These trials aren't about revenge. They're about justice. Don't you want justice, Rose Justice? ~ Elizabeth Wein

It is the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe, but it is a claim from which I will not recede and which, God willing, I will make good. ~ Adolf Hitler

If a bomb has your name on it, you are dead whatever you do; and if not, it will miss you. ~ James Lingard

The battle of Kursk ... the forcing of the Dnieper ... and the liberation of Kiev, left Hitlerite Germany facing catastrophe. ~ Vasily Chuikov

The Bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives. ~ William D. Leahy

I am asking of no man more than I myself was ready throughout four years to do ~ Adolf Hitler

Some mules just seem to be born with the hee-haw habit. Back home we call those fellows 'Missouri Nightingales'. ~ Maureen Daly

I thought about the afterlife and wondered if people shared death stories. If so, i'd have the coolest story ever. You died in your sleep? Drunk driver? Cancer, huh? World War 2? Well... yeah, those deaths are great and all, but wit till I tell you what happened to me. Yeah... that's right... I said a kraken. ~ Colleen Houck

Lovely morning, World War Two. ~ Thomas Pynchon

We live in hope that the good we do here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. We also hope to win the war. We hope that right and goodness will triumph, and that when the war is won, we shall have a better world. And we work toward that end. We buy war bonds and put out incendiaries and knit stockings---"

And pumpkin-colored scarves, Polly thought.

"---and volunteer to take in evacuated children and work in hospitals and drive ambulances" - here Alf grinned and nudged Eileen sharply in the ribs - "and man anti-aircraft guns. We join the Home Guard and the ATS and the Civil Defence, but we cannot know whether the scrap metal we collect, the letter we write to a solider, the vegetables we grow, will turn out in the end to have helped win the war or not. We act in faith.

"But the vital thing is that we act. We do not rely on hope alone, thought hope is our bulwark, our light through dark days and darker nights. We also work, and fight, and endure, and it does not matter whether the part we play is large or small. The reason that God marks the fall of the sparrow is that he knows that it is as important to the world as the bulldog or the wolf. We all, all must do 'our bit'. For it is through our deeds that the war will be won, through our kindness and devotion and courage that we make that better world for which we long. ~ Connie Willis

Imagine a world where people were 10% happier and less reactive. Marriage, parenting, road rage, politics - all would be improved upon. Public health revolutions can happen rapidly. Most Americans didn't brush their teeth until after world war 2 after soldiers were demanded to maintain oral hygiene. Exercise didn't get popular until science proved its benefits. Mindfulness, I had come to believe, could, in fact, change the world. ~ Dan Harris

Our revenge is to live. We may be hunted like animals but we will not become animals. We have all chosen this - to live free, like human beings, for as long as we can. Each day of freedom is a victory. And if we die trying to live, at least we die like human beings. ~ Tuvia Bielski

There are guys bleeding to death who don't know it, they're smiling, they're talking, they don't feel pain because they're in shock, they ask you for some water and then they're dead. On D-day I ran past a guy lying on his spilled guts with his eyes closed and his thumb in his mouth. Eisenhower's speech had been read to us over the loudspeaker by our commander when we crossed the channel that morning. What valor and inspiration were in his words- all about how we were embarked on a great crusade, that the hopes and prayers of a liberty loving people were going with us ... I got gooseflesh when he asked for the blessing of almighty god on this great and noble undertaking. But how to reconcile that with spilled guts on a beach and flies in the eyes of some dead nineteen year old kid who traded his life for some words on paper? ~ Elizabeth Berg

For the first time a British force had met, held and decisively defeated a major Japanese attack, and followed this up by driving the enemy out of the strongest possible natural positions. ~ William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim

Take the Holocaust for example: Why did God allow Hitler to kill millions of innocent Jews? Because God didn't want to step on Hitler's toes and interfere with his free will? That's a pretty lame excuse. What about the free will of all those Jews who died? I'm pretty sure that getting gassed to death was obviously not their choice.

So, was the Holocaust part of God's great plan? Is that why he allowed it to happen? Is that why God didn't answer the prayers of all those Jews who begged him to make Hitler drop dead?

Why didn't God just make Hitler have a heart attack before he could start World War 2? Why didn't he simply prevent Hitler from being born? How could a God who is supposed to be all good all the time allow something like the Holocaust?

Or did God not just LET it happen? Maybe God MADE the Holocaust happen, because everything that happens, happens for a good reason? Are our minds simply too tiny, too inferior, to understand God's divine plan? Are we just too stupid to see the greater good that came out of the Holocaust?

If that were true, and everything that happens, including the Holocaust, is part of God's perfect plan, then that means that Hitler really wasn't a bad man at all. He was actually doing God's work. And if Hitler did exactly what he was supposed to do in God's great plan, then Hitler obviously didn't have free will, but was just God's puppet. So that means Hitler was a good guy. A man of God.

Sor ~ Oliver Markus

If you are planning a visit to Europe, you're probably thinking about Berlin, but if you've never been to Berlin, you're actually thinking about Warsaw. If you have been to Berlin, you'll feel you've gone back in time 10 years. Either way, there's no travel like business travel, and there's no better excuse to visit Warsaw than MCE. Be sure to visit the museum of the Warsaw resistance while you're there to learn some things about World War 2 they left out of your textbook. ~ Mike Lee

For all it's problems and difficulties, life is mostly a wonderful experience, and it is up to each person to make the most of each day. I hope you are successful in your life, but look to the heavens and the earth and especially to other people to find your real wealth. Wherever I am, wherever you go, know that my love goes with you. ~ Elizabeth Berg

We must be the great arsenal of democracy. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

I can't recite the chronology or elaborate on the facts. I can't explain the reasons or defend how we lived our lives. What I can tell you is how the events of 1933 sowed the seeds that fundamentally changed our future, that there was little hand-wringing or emotion, that circumstances were beyond control, that there was no recourse or appeal. I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.

Ralph Webster, A Smile in One Eye: a Tear in the Other ~ Ralph Webster

The art of living. Isn't that a funny expression? ~ Anne Frank

It was difficult to understand him. On the one hand he pandered even to the most unimportant things while on the other he was excessive and unfeeling. He might show the most fatherly concern for a female secretary who had stabbed her toe but be utterly ice-cold when issuing orders which set thousands to their deaths. ~ Heinz Linge

Kill Japs, kills Japs, kill more Japs! ~ William Halsey

In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty's Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power. They have given the Polish Government an assurance to this effect. I may add that the French Government have authorized me to make it plain that they stand in the same position in this matter. ~ Neville Chamberlain

What we dedicate today is not a memorial to war, rather it's a tribute to the physical and moral courage that makes heroes out of farm and city boys and that inspires Americans in every generation to lay down their lives for people they will never meet, for ideals that make life itself worth living. ~ Bob Dole

Fascism accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with the state's. ~ Benito Mussolini

Over everything - up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks - was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of the plants intact; it had stimulated them. ~ John Hersey

Make time for prayer and reflection; try to understand your value as a man on earth but see, too, your proper place in the scheme of things. It may sound funny to say this, but I have come to see that we are all far more important and less important than we think. ~ Elizabeth Berg

You are familiar with World War 2?"
"Of course I am. I'm dead, not stupid. ~ Donna Augustine

The Prime Minister wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights debates like a war and the war like a debate. ~ Aneurin Bevan

I have returned many times to honour the valiant men who died ... every man who set foot on Omaha Beach was a hero. ~ Omar N. Bradley

They took my voice," I told her. " I have nothing to sing for."

"No. No. That isn't true. Don't let them have that victory. Don't you dare! ~ Vesper Stamper

The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn't. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders. ~ Yehuda Bauer

My book "Bamboo Walls" is forever because the Djojobojo Prophecy is timeless! ~ Yvonne B Murtha

If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.. ~ Joseph Goebbels

Germany has solemnly recognized and guaranteed France her frontiers as determined after the Saar plebiscite ... We thereby finally renounced all claims to Alsace-Lorraine, a land for which we have fought two great wars. ~ Adolf Hitler

THE THING WAS AN EXPERT IN HORROR, BUT THIS HUMAN HORROR INDEED EXCEEDED ANY OTHER POSSIBLE FATE. NOT ONLY BECAUSE IT WAS WITHOUT MERCY, BUT BECAUSE IT WAS ACTED UPON RATIONALLY AND WITHOUT COMPULSION. IT WAS A CHOICE. THE KILLING WAS UNRELATED TO THE LARGE WAR, AND IT SERVED NO OTHER PURPOSE THEN EVIL. MEN CHOSE TO DO THIS TO OTHER MEN AND INVENTED REASONS AND PLACES AND MYTHS IN ORDER TO SATISFY THEIR DESIRE IN A LOGICAL AND METHODICAL WAY. ~ Guillermo Del Toro

The Djojobojo Prophecy doesn't just tell you WHAT happened and WHERE it happened...it tells you WHY it happened! ~ Yvonne B Murtha

Meet me tonight, six o'clock sharp, at the gates of the municipal hospital. It is very important that you are precise. Not five minutes early, not five minutes late. In case I'm not there, you leave straight away. Got it?"

Ingrid aka 'Alis K'
The Informer ~ Steen Langstrup

I am German, yes, but I am not a Nazi. There is a difference, and one day I hope you understand that. ~ Caroline Leech

So yesterday the high-ranking visitors came after all. . . H[immler} at their head. A slight, insignificant-looking little man, with a rather good-humored face. High peaked cap, mustache, and small spectacles. I think: If you wanted to trace back all the misery and horror to just one person, it would have to be him. Around him a lot of fellows with weary faces. Very big, heavily dressed men, they swerve along whichever way he turns, like a swarm of flies, changing places among themselves (they don't stand still for a moment) and moving like a single whole. It makes a fatally alarming impression. (January 30, 1944) ~ David Koker

But if she'd come then, she would never have properly appreciated it. She'd have seen the happy crowds and the Union Jacks and the bonfires, but she'd have no idea of what it meant to see the lights on after years of navigating in the dark, what it meant to look up at an approaching plane without fear, to hear church bells after years of air-raid sirens. She'd have had no idea of the years of rationing and shabby clothes and fear which lay behind the smiles and the cheering, no idea of what it had cost to bring this day to pass
the lives of all those soldiers and sailors and airmen and civilians. ~ Connie Willis

Future generations would be convinced that nothing good could ever have existed in a country that produced such evil. They would think only of these evils. It would be as if these unleashed dark forces had grotesquely marched like devils on dead horses, backward through the gash in the present, and had destroyed the German past too. ~ Eric Metaxas

The discovery, that at no time did this man (Hitler) pose or intend a real threat to Britain or the Empire. ~ David Irving

United in this determination and with unshakable faith in the cause for which we fight, we will, with God's help, go forward to our greatest victory. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Even after years of war, some men retained scruples about licensed
homicide. [ ... ] Lieutenant Peter Downward commanded the sniper
platoon of 13 Para. He had never himself killed a man with a rifle,
but one day he found himself peering at a German helmet just visible
at the corner of an air-raid shelter
an enemy sniper.
I had his head spot in the middle of my telescopic sight, my safety
catch was off, but I simply couldn't press the trigger. I suddenly
realised that I had a young man's life in my hands, and for the cost
of one round, about twopence, I could wipe out eighteen or nineteen
years of human life. My dithering deliberations were brought back to
earth with a bump as Kirkbride suddenly shouted: 'Go on, sir. Shoot
the bastard! He's going to fire again.' I pulled the trigger and saw
the helmet jerk back. I had obviously got him, and felt completely
drained ... What had I done? ~ Max Hastings

It is impossible to put into words what we have been through. What happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans fled twice from the ghetto ... My life's dream has come true. Defense in the ghetto has become a fact. Armed Jewish resistance and revenge are actually happening. I have witnessed the glorious and heroic combat of the Jewish fighters. ~ Mordechai Anielewicz

For kilometres on end the road was totally jammed with vehicles drawn up three or four abreast - petrol tankers, ammunition trucks, teams of horses,ambulances. It was impossible to move forwards or back. Russian combat aircraft now arrived in wave after wave, and threw bombs into that unprotected, inextricable mass. This is what hell must be like. ~ Christopher Duffy

We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighers did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

She put her hand over her heart. Oh boy. It hurts. It's a real pain. Right here. ~ Elizabeth Berg

There are only three kinds of Irishmen who can't understand women. Young men, old men and men of middle age. ~ Elizabeth Berg

We're so far away from those stars ~ Elizabeth Berg

THEY FOUGHT TOGETHER AS BROTHERS-IN-ARMS. THEY DIED TOGETHER AND NOW THEY SLEEP SIDE BY SIDE. TO THEM WE HAVE A SOLEMN OBLIGATION. ~ Chester W. Nimitz

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting ~ Erich Maria Remarque

Except for a roll of Harding's eyes, everyone ignored me, which is the way I liked it when I had to hang around with senior officers. They had a way of thinking up ideas that got you killed and them promoted. ~ James R. Benn

No amphibious attack in history has approached this one in size. Along miles of coastline there were hundreds of vessels and small boats afloat and ant-like files of advancing troops ashore. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

We have learned that it is better to live with one leg than to spend your life on your knees. ~ Gregory A. Freeman

Just one look and then I knew that all I longed for long ago was you ~ Elizabeth Berg

She dreamed of Venice. However, it wasn't a city alive with stars dripping like liquid gold into canals, or Bougainvillea spilling from flowerpots like overfilled glasses of wine. In this dream, Venice was without color. Where pastel palazzi once lined emerald lagoons, now, gray, shadowy mounds of rubble paralleled murky canals. Lovers could no longer share a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs; it had been the target of an obsessive Allied bomb in search of German troops. The only sign of life was in Piazza San Marco, where the infamous pigeons continued to feed. However, these pigeons fed not on seeds handed out by children, but on corpses rotting under the elongated shadow of the Campanile. ~ Pamela Allegretto