From Primo Levi to Anna Frank: the most beautiful phrases from books that talk about the Shoah

"Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is around us, it is in the air. The plague has died down, but the infection is spreading: it would be foolish to deny it. In this book, the signs are described: the disavowal of human solidarity, the 'dull or cynical indifference to the pain of others, the abdication of the intellect and the moral sense before the principle of authority, and mainly, at the root of everything, a tide of cowardice, an abysmal cowardice, in the mask of warrior virtue, of love of country and fidelity to an idea " - Primo Levi, Asymmetry and life "

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"Maybe I won't do important things, but history is made up of small anonymous gestures, maybe tomorrow I'll die, maybe before that German, but all the things I will do before I die and my death itself will be bits of history, and all thoughts what I'm doing now affect my history of tomorrow, tomorrow's history of mankind " - Italo Calvino, "The path of the spider's nests"

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"It is truly wonderful that I have not given up all my ideals because they seem absurd and impossible to realize. Yet I hold them tight because, despite everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.It is impossible for me to build everything on the basis of death, misery, confusion. I see the world slowly changing into a desert, I smell stronger and stronger the approach of the roar that will kill us, I participate in the pain of thousands of men, yet when I look at the sky , I think that everything will turn to good again, that even this ruthless hardness will cease, that peace and serenity will return " - Anne Frank, "Diary"

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"These memories are not just clothes, something that can be undressed and put in the closet. They are engraved in our skin! We cannot get rid of them" - Trudi Birger, "I've dreamed of chocolate for years"

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"When you can't forget, you try to forgive" - Primo Levi, "If this is a man"

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"I will never forget that night, the first night in the camp, which made my life a long night and seven times locked.
I will never forget that smoke.
I will never forget the little faces of the children whose bodies I had seen turn into puffs of smoke under a silent sky.
I will never forget those flames that burned my Faith forever.
I will never forget that nocturnal silence that took away the desire to live for eternity.
I will never forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul, and my dreams, which took the face of the desert.
I will never forget all this, even if I were condemned to live as long as God himself. Never"

Elie Wiesel, "The night"

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"We survivors of the Holocaust are nailed: we would like to free ourselves from the unbearable weight of what has been and instead we are forced to relive it every time. the extermination of the Jews by not talking about it, and by unloading on us victims the responsibility and pain of memory. A real madness " - Edith Bruck

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"I don't remember exactly when I decided that Konradin should become my friend, but I had no doubt that, sooner or later, he would become one. Until the day of his arrival I hadn't had any friends. There was no one in my class. who could have responded to the "romantic idea I had of friendship, no one I really admired or could understand my need for trust, loyalty and self-denial, no one I would have willingly given my life for. I hesitated a little." before writing that "I would have gladly given my life for a friend", but even now, thirty "years later, I am convinced that this was not an exaggeration and that not only would I have been ready to die for a friend, but the "I would have done almost with joy" - Fred Uhlman, "The" friend found "