Preface

“You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find warm food
And friendly faces when you return home.
Consider if this is a man
Who works in mud,
Who knows no peace,
Who fights for a crust of bread,
Who dies by a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair, without name,
Without the strength to remember,
Empty are her eyes, cold her womb,
Like a frog in winter.
Never forget that this has happened.
Remember these words.
Engrave them in your hearts,
When at home or in the street,
When lying down, when getting up.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your houses be destroyed,
May illness strike you down,
May your offspring turn their faces from you.”

(Excerpts)

Nowadays, hell must be something like this: an empty room where we stand exhausted, a dripping tap before us, yet unable to drink; waiting for something, surely terrible, while nothing happens, and the hours pass with nothing happening. How can we think? We can no longer think; we are almost dead. Someone sits on the floor. Time passes, drop by drop... We have already become ghosts.

[…]

Then, for the first time, we realized that our language has no words capable of expressing this outrage, this annihilation of man. As if endowed with the prophetic gift of foresight, we saw the truth before us: we had reached the very bottom. There was nowhere lower to fall; we could imagine no existence more wretched than our own. Nothing belonged to us anymore. They had taken away our clothes, our shoes, our hair. If we spoke, no one would listen to us; and if they did, they would not understand us. They would take away even our names, and if we wished to preserve them, we would have to find within ourselves the strength to save them, and with them to save something of who we once were.

[…]

**Häftling** (prisoner): I learned that I was a *Häftling*. My name is **174517**. We have been christened anew: for the rest of our lives we shall bear this number tattooed on our left arm. (pp. 30–31)

…because in five minutes the bread will be distributed—*pane, Brot, broitchleb, pain, lechem, kenyer*—that sacred grey mass which always seems so immense in the hands of others and so pitifully small in your own, enough to make you want to weep. (p. 45)

[…]

We fail to understand the complex nature of absolute misery, and so we give only one name to its many causes—numerous and arranged in a cruel hierarchy—the name of what appears to be the greatest one. And when that cause disappears, we discover, to our painful surprise, that behind it lies another, and behind that another still. Thus, when the cold finally ceased—the cold that throughout the winter we had regarded as our only enemy—we realized that we were hungry. And repeating the same mistake, we said, “If only we were not hungry…” But how is it possible even to imagine not being hungry? The camp is hunger; we are hunger itself, its living embodiment. (p. 88)

Here they wander by the dozens, lips half-open and eyes gleaming—the desperate victims of hunger, driven by a deceptive instinct toward the place where goods are traded, making the torment of the stomach more piercing and the flow of saliva more relentless. At best, they carry the miserable half-ration of bread they have managed to save through painful self-denial, irrationally hoping that an opportunity for a profitable exchange will arise with someone naïve and unaware of the current prices. Some of them, endowed with fierce patience, buy a litre of soup with half a ration of bread, then, in a corner, carefully extract the few tiny pieces of potato from the bottom. They exchange the soup again for bread, the bread once more for another litre of soup, and repeat the process until their nerves are exhausted or until someone they have deceived catches them in the act and teaches them a harsh lesson by exposing them to public ridicule. (pp. 94–95)

Their lives are short, yet their number is countless. These **Muselmänner**, the drowned, are the soul of the camp: that anonymous mass, endlessly renewed and always the same, the mass of non-human beings who walk and toil in silence, with the divine spark extinguished within them, emptied even of the capacity to suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates even to speak of their death, for they no longer fear it—they are too exhausted even to feel it. (p. 109)

To destroy a man is as difficult as to create one. It was not easy; it took time. But you succeeded, Germans. Beneath your gaze we have become obedient. You have nothing to fear from us: no act of resistance, no word of defiance, not even a look of judgment. (p. 181)

**26 January 1945:** Our world had become a world of the dead and of ghosts. The last trace of civilization had vanished from within us and around us. The work of brutalizing humanity, begun by the triumphant Germans, was completed by the defeated Germans. (p. 206)

Fascism was still present, but hidden within its cocoon. It was preparing its transformation so that it could reappear in a new guise—unrecognizable, more respectable, adapted to the conditions of a world emerging from the devastation that fascism itself had caused. (p. 213)

However immoral, foolish, or barbaric their doctrines were, millions of faithful followers praised them and followed them to their deaths. We must remember that these followers—and among them the willing executors of inhuman orders—were not born executioners. With very few exceptions, they were not monsters: they were ordinary people. Monsters exist, but they are too few to do great harm. Far more dangerous are ordinary men, the officials ready to believe and obey without question, like Eichmann, Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, like the French military officers who became butchers in Algeria twenty years later, and the American military officers who became butchers in Vietnam thirty years later. (p. 237)