“...One teacher in particular went out of his way to humiliate me. He was a history teacher named Bencur. During one lesson he began to quote from a speech of Hitler’s to the effect that the Jews should be wiped off from the face of the earth. Turning to me he asked what I thought of the speech and of that particular sentence. I did not know what to reply and I think I said nothing. So he began to shout, saying that I was treating the question and him and all of the teachers disrespectfully, and he finally dismissed me from the class.”
Moshe Sandberg/Sanbar
“I sat down by myself in one of the back rows of the auditorium, wondering what the principal wanted from us. And without really listening to his words I knew what he was going to say. ‘Someday you will return - we will welcome you back with open arms. But now we must part. My heart is heavy as I tell you this news. But I have no choice.”
Rosemarie Moskin
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
“Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz