It all seems like such a long time ago, and yet, in other ways, still so immediate. After all, it was supposed to have been ‘the best years of our lives.’
— PFC Frank Iglehart on being 19 and in combat, The Short Life of the ASTP
March 27, 2013, 7:05pm / 16
One thing I am certain about: The last word on the Third Reich belongs not to the perpetrators, but to those who come after, however limited our insights. The perpetrators long ago forfeited the right to be the ones who got to draw a line in the sand.
— Martin Davidson, The Perfect Nazi: Uncovering My Grandfather’s Secret Past
November 23, 2012, 2:00pm / 14
It’s awful, what they have done to mankind. The darkest scenes from the Middle Ages or the Inquisition are reproduced and multiplied here to the extreme. Their monstrous “revival” will forever leave the mark of shame and infamy on the “civilized” and “cultured” Germany of the twentieth century.The darkest and most degrading slavery imaginable has made it so that life in this camp has nothing in common with life as humans conceive it.
It is indeed a cuel plan aiming to cause the systematic and certain end of thousands of human lives. Of that, there is not the slightest doubt, not the slightest doubt. It requires nothing but to see clearly and to follow attentively everything that goes on in order to deduce, with no hesitation: this camp is not made to hold civilian deportees or prisoners of war for a specific period of time, to temporarily deprive them of freedom for whatever political, diplomatic, or strategic reasons with the intention of holding them and releasing them alive before or after the cessation of hostilities…No: this camp is consciously and knowingly organized and arranged in such a way as to methodically exterminate thousands of human beings according to a plan.
If this continues for only one more month, it is highly doubtful that one single person among us will come through.
—
Hanna Levy-Hass in April 1945, Diary of Bergen-Belsen
Hanna Levy-Hass (1913-2001), a teacher and Yugoslavian Jew, was an inmate of Bergen-Belsen who kept a diary in secret, recording in great detail what was happening in the camp and the differences between a “death factory” such as Auschwitz and death at Bergen-Belsen.
September 16, 2012, 1:19am / 31
That, I’ve come to believe, is the hardest thing about war: to be faced with so many emotional situations involving people who’ve come to mean the world to you. Losing those people, sometimes right in front of you. And yet not being able to grieve for them. Even after the war, when you were expected to just get on with your life as if nothing more had happened to you than, say, a reshuffling of your living room furniture.
— Sgt. Don Malarkey, Easy Company Soldier
September 07, 2012, 10:00pm / 44
Only the victors have stories to tell. We, the vanquished, were all cowards and weaklings by then, whose memories, fears, and enthusiams should not be remembered.
— The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer
June 13, 2012, 1:52pm / 73
