{"quotes":[{"text":"Isolation of catastrophic experiences. Dissociation may function to seal off overwhelming trauma into a compartmentalized area of conscious until the person is better able to integrate it into mainstream consciousness. The function of dissociation is particularly common in survivors of combat, political torture, or natural or transportation disasters.","author":"Marlene Steinberg","tags":["amnesia","catastrophe","combat","complex-trauma","concentration-camp-survivor","concentration-camps","consciousness","dissociated","dissociation","dissociative","memory","political-prisoners","psychology","soldiers","survivor","torture","trauma","trauma-survivors"],"id":2764,"author_id":"Marlene+Steinberg"},{"text":"Some days in the camp you prayed to live; some days you prayed to die quick. Some days you didn't bother praying, knowing there was no sense to anything.","author":"Allan Dare Pearce","tags":["concentration-camps","death-and-dying","living","praying","war"],"id":48530,"author_id":"Allan+Dare+Pearce"},{"text":"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 time the thermometer hovered between 5 and 15 degrees below zero. From morning till night we scraped, shoveled, and pushed wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of snow to the brook. The work detail consisted of more than 1,000 clergymen, forced to keep moving by SS men and Capos who kicked us and beat us with truncheons.We had to make rounds with the wheelbarrows from the assembly square to the brook and back. Not a moment of rest was allowed, and much of the time we were forced to run.At one point I tripped over my barrow and fell, and it took me a while to get up again. An SS man dashed over and ordered me to turn with the full load. He ran beside me, beating me constantly with a leather strap. When I got to the brook I was not allowed to dump out the heavy snow, but had to make a second complete round with it instead.When the guard finally went off and I tried to let go of the wheelbarrow, I found that one of my hands was frozen fast to it. I had to blow on it with warm breath to get it free.","author":"Jean Bernard","tags":["catholicism","catholics","concentration-camps","good-friday","nazi-germany","nazis","nazism","priest","priesthood","priests","ss","suffering","torture"],"id":77280,"author_id":"Jean+Bernard"},{"text":"Comrades, we are going to try to cheer you up, and our sense of humor will help us in this endeavor, although the phrase gallows humor has never seemed so logical and appropriate. The external circumstances are exactly in our favor. We need only to take a look at the barbed wire fences, so high and full of electricity. Just like your expectations.And then there are the watchtowers that monitor our every move. The guards have machine guns. But machine guns won’t intimidate us, comrades. They just have barrels of guns, whereas we are going to have barrels of laughs.You may be surprised at how upbeat and cheerful we are. Well, comrades, there are goods reasons for this. It’s been a long time since we were in Berlin. But every time we appeared there, we felt very uneasy. We were afraid we’d get sent to the concentration camps. Now that fear is gone. We’re already here.","author":"Rudolph Herzog","tags":["comedians","concentration-camps","dictatorship","germany","history","humor","jokes","nazi","third-reich","werner-flinck"],"id":150564,"author_id":"Rudolph+Herzog"},{"text":"Slavery's fundamental offense against human rights was not that it took liberty away (which can happen in many other situations), but that it excluded a certain category of people even from the possibility of fighting for freedom—a fight possible under tyranny, and even under the desperate conditions of modern terror (but not under any conditions of concentration-camp life). Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were 'born' free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature. Yet in the light of recent events it is possible to say that even slaves still belonged to some sort of human community; their labor was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them within the pale of humanity. To be a slave was after all to have a distinctive character, a place in society—more than the abstract nakedness of beig human and nothing but human. Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["1967","concentration-camps","crimes-against-humanity","human-rights","humanity","rights-of-man","slavery"],"id":159320,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"A crude age. Peace is stabilized with cannon and bombers, humanity with concentration camps and pogroms. We're living in a time when all standards are turned upside-down, Kern. Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What's more, there are whole races who believe it!","author":"Erich Maria Remarque","tags":["concentration-camps","peace","philosophy","philosophy-of-life","realism","troublemakers"],"id":166650,"author_id":"Erich+Maria+Remarque"},{"text":"Here. Here I am.You've taken everything from us, but not who we are! We still exist! One day grass will grow here and overgrow the ruins. Or day this will be forgotten. But you... No one will ever forget you! The shame of humanity.","author":"Bruno Apitz","tags":["concentration-camps","history","holocaust","humanity","naked-among-wolves","shame","wwii"],"id":171448,"author_id":"Bruno+Apitz"},{"text":"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, palms facing out and fingers pointing backward. Then they turn his hands inwards, tie a chain around his wrists and hoist him up by it. His own wight twists his joints and pulls them apart...Several of the priest who were hung up last year never recovered and died. If you don't have a strong heart, you don't survive it. Many have a permanently crippled hand.","author":"Jean Bernard","tags":["catholicism","catholics","concentration-camps","good-friday","nazi-germany","nazis","nazism","priest","priesthood","priests","ss","suffering","torture"],"id":305632,"author_id":"Jean+Bernard"},{"text":"Most white Americans were willing to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of national security as long as they were the civil liberties of someone else.","author":"Neil Nakadate","tags":["civil-liberties","concentration-camps","endurance","japanese","minidoka","national-security","policy","racism"],"id":336582,"author_id":"Neil+Nakadate"},{"text":"I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian – I’d been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregational minister, had some sympathy with the idea that the Jews had killed Christ. But any indoctrination was offset by my discovery of the concentration camps, of the Final Solution. Whilst the term 'Holocaust' had yet to enter the vocabulary I was overwhelmed by my realisation of what Germany had perpetrated on Jews. It became a major factor in my movement towards the political left. I’d already read 'The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck, the Penguin paperback that would change my life. The story of the gas chambers completed the process of radicalisation and would, just three years later, lead me to join the Communist Party.","author":"Phillip Adams","tags":["antisemitism","atheist","awareness","christ-killers","christian-church","communism","communist","communist-party","concentration-camps","congregational-minister","father","final-solution","gas-chambers","germany","holocaust","jews","john-steinbeck","minister","politics","steinbeck","sympathy","the-grapes-of-wrath"],"id":429452,"author_id":"Phillip+Adams"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":15,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}