Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

I promise you a love affair with a sun-bathed Austrian princess beyond anything you imagine—in love, in beauty, in intensity. A love that will power you to the end of our time together. You are...

When I was a schoolboy in England, the old bound volumes of Kipling in the library had gilt swastikas embossed on their covers. The symbol’s ‘hooks’ were left-handed, as opposed to the right-handed ones of...

Roy

I shook with helplessness and rage, but also with fear. This was what fighting back earned you. More abuse. More death. Half a dozen Jews would be murdered today because one man refused to die...

Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well.

The greatest miracle was that in the end I could actually feel pity for those men because they were so deluded: they thought they had power and really they had nothing. I will never forget...

Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn’t do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives....

The ceremony was fast so we wouldn’t be caught. When it was over, the men all whispered ‘Mazel tov’ and climbed back onto their shelves. I went up to the boy and pressed the wooden...

They [Nazi captors] had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he [Viktor Frankl] had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options.

When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make...

Once, [Rabbi Chanoch] Teller was traveling with 16 of his [18] offspring … while changing planes in Frankfurt, Teller noticed a German woman gaping. ‘Are all of these your children?’ the woman asked. ‘From one...

And you wanted to escape,’ a man near me whispered to another man. ‘You wanted to run off into the woods and fight. But do you see? Do you see what the rest of them...

There are people whose souls have just withered, people who are willing to go along with anything evil – anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever is in power.

Odd, don’t you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men...

I may be a criminal lunatic, but I’m an AMERICAN criminal lunatic!

I had survived the work gangs in the ghetto. Baked bread under cover of night. Hidden in a pigeon coop. Had a midnight bar mitzvah in the basement of an abandoned building. I had watched...

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she...

The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and...

We is better than you or I.” We will not persecute, nor tolerate persecution. We will not dominate, nor tolerate subjugation.

The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure...

Suffering took hold of me like a magic spell abolishing all differences between friends and strangers.

Does the surgeon spare the cancer because he must cut to remove it? We are cruel. Of course we are cruel.

The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to the elements by the Communists, at least after they had briefly employed it as a ‘furniture...

Caleb tossed him an explosive and Japhet lunged to catch it before it hit the ground. He glared but Caleb didn’t notice. Instead, he started to whistle I didn’t raise my boy to be a...

[…] during one train stop, I watched as another guard with a spirit of empathy, ran out into an apple orchard and picked apples. He carried his jacket like a bag and filled it with...

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin’s enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was...

It is their usual reaction; they employ not words and reasoned conversation or discourse to resolve problems, but the truncheon, the jackbooted foot, or the gun. Sophistication requires more competence and skill than mere thuggery....

You don’t always get what you wish for. Especially in Nazi Germany

I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew...

Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that...

The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.

Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill...

On Good Friday last year the SS found some pretext to punish 60 priests with an hour on “the tree.” That is the mildest camp punishment. They tie a man’s hands together behind his back,...

I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.

First, our enemies were the natives, then they were the Nazis, then after a while it was the communists. Finally, at the pinnacle of what we’re calling civilization, our enemies are the Islamic terrorists. Our...

The first days of January 1942 brought enormous amounts of snow. The reader already knows what snow meant for the clergy. But this time the torture surpassed the bounds of the endurable. At the same...