If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of... everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Forced labor as a punishment is limited as to time and intensity. The convict retains his rights over his body; he is not absolute...ly tortured and he is not absolutely dominated. Banishment banishes only from one part of the world to another part of the world, also inhabited by human beings; it does not exclude from the human world altogether. Throughout history slavery has been an institution within a social order; slaves were not, like concentration-camp inmates, withdrawn from the sight and hence the protection of their fellow-men; as instruments of labor they had a definite price and as property a definite value. The concentration-camp inmate has no price, because he can always be replaced; nobody knows to whom he belongs, because he is never seen. From the point of view of normal society he is absolutely superfluous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We're built, as a nation, on the grounds of a concentration camp. It's like saying "OK, here's Auschwitz. Here's where we'll start... our country."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Monsieur ... I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to bel...ieve in men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to f...ind a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if ... there weren't any other people living in the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each thick finger, a fattened worm, gesticulates, And his words strike you like they were many-pound weights.... His full cockroach moustache hints a laughter benigning, And the shafts of his boots: always spotlessly shining.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The symmetrical piles of white bodies, the round white breast-shapes of the heaps,... the smell of the smoke, the dogs the wires the rope the hunger. It had happened to others. There was a word for us. I was: a Jew.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freedom-loving people around the world must say ... I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am Lao...tian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »