The problems I had existed before I did, and I discovered them.

It was not,’ said Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, ‘very easy to be good then.

The descent to barbarism had begun with Rotterdam. It ended with Dresden and then with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever moral differences had existed when the war began were erased by its end. The victors had...

It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chamberswere built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same...

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...

They would never forget the war. The world wouldn’t let them, and neither would history.

When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The courde of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system’s defeat and demise. […] The central subject, the essence,...

[And conversely, Woodrow Wilson finishes dead last.]Yes […] I think World War I was avoidable for the United States, certainly; we kind of look back on Germany as being evil (because of World War II),...

Schnell, schnell.” There are men and women of all ages, even children. Among them I see one of my former students, Jeanine Crémieux. She got married in 1941 and had a baby last spring. She...

That there is in this world neither brains, nor goodness, nor good sense, but only brute force. Bloodshed. Starvation. Death. That there was not the slightest hope not even a glimmer of hope, of justice...

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...

I will never be able to go back to Sweden without knowing inside myself that I’d done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible

Gideon conquers, the church conquers, we conquer, because faith conquers. But the victory belongs not to Gideon, the church, or ourselves, but to God. And God’s victory means our defeat, our humiliation; it means God’s...

Since youre here, Courtauld said wearily, youd better explain why these lollipops or whatever they’re called have to be on silk. If I’d had a lollipop I knew precisely where Id stick it.

What you don’t know going in is that when you come out, you will be scarred for life. Whether you were in for a week, a month, or a year—even if you come home without...

This isn’t to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each...

[…] 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...

Work, love, courage and hope,Make me good and help me cope!

Only happy people have nightmares, from overeating. For those who live a nightmare reality, sleep is a black hole, lost in time, like death.

Ruth wiped her eyes. Successful at a price? Forgiven but damaged? She wished so much more for her baby sister.

I wanted something that would address the strengths and weaknesses of humanity. I wanted a story that could move readers. My Honor Flight is that story.

Of course the people in the metro didn’t see a thing!…what a joke! petrified ratlets! but they’ll still come out to refute me! make claims!…that nothing got bombed!…squished! powdered! that the firmament was calm, and...

The only difference between a grown-up’s mistake and a child’s is the size of the consequence.

In the end the war was Hitler’s war. It was not perhaps the war he wanted. But it was the war he was prepared to risk if he had to. Nothing could deter him…He was...

While stationed in Fort Jackson, I experienced racial prejudice for the first time and came to the understanding that humans are not born with prejudice, but learn prejudice. Back home in South Dakota, I only...

The art of living. Isn’t that a funny expression?

As I remember his laugh, there was nothing mad about it, it was more like the laugh of someone who has been the victim of a practical joke, a farce in which he had believed...

Brick walls towered over her. Decrepit staircases crowded about her. Nothing had changed. The line there, the lessons there, the rape there. Shouldn’t the place be crimson with blood and black with shame?

Queenie, herself again, took hold of Maddie’s hand and squeezed it tightly. She walked all the way back across the airfield without letting it go. Maddie closed her eyes and flew again in the ethereal...

Finally, I wish to remember the millions of Allied servicemen and prisoners of war who lived the story of the Second World War. Many of these men never came home; many others returned bearing emotional...

The tears are falling freely now, and I don’t care if he sees them. They’re tears of relief for my nephew, worry for my grandfather and my brother, and shame for my mistake. I figure...

The sepia tone of November has become blood-soaked with paper poppies festooning the lapels of our politicians, newsreaders and business leaders … I will no longer allow my obligation as a veteran to remember those...

To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went...

Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us...

War always reaches the depths of horror because of idiots who perpetuate terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengeance.

So much of the inexplicable about the Soviet experience—the hatred of the peasantry for example, the secrecy and paranoia, the murderous witch hunt of the Great Terror, the placing of the Party above family and...

Look at me!’ I screeched. ‘Look at me, Amadeus von Linden, you sadistic hypocrite, and watch this time! You’re not questioning me now, this isn’t your work, I’m not an enemy agent spewing wireless code!...

We had our family patterns and were quite comfortable in them, which made it even more shocking when, just after his eightieth birthday, Papa began bringing up his time as a prisoner of war in...

One day this war will end. And when it does, Tule Lake will be just a memory.

Superior insight into history used to be exhilarating for radicals: if we can see more clearly than the Enemy what is really going on, then we can use this knowledge to advance our values. But...

In political affairs illusions are usually the product of a failure to appreciate change; but such failure-usually a necessary and perhaps salutary part of human affairs-becomes, when the change is very fast, not a stabilizing...

Until the War, we claimed to be equal; simpletons, some say, but equal man to man.

Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private...

Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can’t feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the...

right side” of the war, ever heard—let alone answered?

It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.

There began to appear before my romantic eyes…a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.

Potkraj Drugoga svjetskog rata izvukli su me iz škole i, kao šesnaestogodišnjaka, gurnuli u vojsku. Nakon kratke vojničke izobrazbe u würzburškim kasarnama došao sam na frontu koja se u to vrijeme već bila pomakla preko...

Ah, my dear friend, cheer up… After all, we have peace! And because there is peace, the occupiers can’t behave so abominably anymore. All right, we’re not free. But we are used to that, Mr....