Goose-bumpy Quotes By Concentration Camps Survivors

There is only a void, a body without a soul, staring into space.

Concentrations camps have been one of those chapters in human history that you can label as a black hole. There is only a void, a body without a soul, staring into space.

How can one write about something soulless? How can one bring to our world an experience that can’t be contained in a stream of words? A concern that most of the concentration camps survivors feared and expressed before writing about this twisted dimension.

How to write about this parallel universe? The unspeakable and indescribable had to come out of their suppressed thoughts, scars, and their dismembered parts.

If drafts exist, they would be well hidden inside my brain. They don’t need polishing, editing, nor refining. They are already there, and they’re ready. All they have to do is to come up to the surface.

Varlam Chamalov

As I’ve been reading concentration camps memoirs, autobiographical novels, and essays, I found myself highlighting pretty much every line in my memory. Some gave me chills, some made me feel sick, and others scared my sleep away. You get the impression that you’re reading a sci-fi book, something like The Handmaid’s tale, only a mental buzzer keeps reminding you, this shit is real.

Robert Antelme

1917–1990

The French writer got arrested by the Vichy Regime in 1944. He was a member of the communist party who was working with the French Resistance against the Nazis. Accordingly, he was deported to Buchenwald, then to Gandersheim concentration camps. After the war was over, he came back as a skull. It was his wife, the famous writer of La Douleur (War: A Memoir), Marguerite Duras, who had been looking after him.

He wrote L’Espèce Humaine. His autobiographical is philosophical, vulgar, and even graphic.

Life and death were living side by side every second. The smoke came out of the crematorium chimney, right next to the kitchens’. Before we got here, the bones of the dead were dipped in the soup of the alive. The golden teeth pulled out from the dead, became currency to get the bread of the live. Death was dreadfully trained to follow the path of life.

As time passes, we transform. The face and the body slip away, handsomes and the ugly look all the same. After three months, we’ll be even less recognizable one from another. And still, everyone holds onto the idea of their uniqueness, loosely.

One can easily be defeated by lice. They pumped my blood. They stung me all over my chest, and now I can feel them strolling around my neck. I put back my shirt and take off the pants and underwear. The underwear laying on my crotch is black, I can’t kill them all. I wrap up everything and throw it from the boxcar’s door. Now, I’m standing next to the door pantless. Lice all over my groin, hanging on the hair. I pull them off; I’m their nest, their haven, I’m theirs.

You know someone is sick when they don’t eat their bread right the way. They keep it under their pillow. And if someone dared to steal it, everyone thought it was as gross as swiping breast milk from a baby. Only a few would have the guts to do such a pitiable thing. But when we see life deserting someone, they still hold their bread, loosely, as if they’ve forgotten holding it captive in their fists; we’re watching it. We know he’s going to die, he’s one of us, someone to whom this piece of bread has become useless. Everybody is watching, no one touches the piece of bread, they are waiting. Now that he’s dying, this bread is sacred as a baby’s milk, more like an inheritance.

Primo Levi

1919–1987

Primo Levi is an Italian Jewish chemist who was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and survived the Holocaust. Primo Levi had struggled even before the deportation. Back in 1938, Fascist Italy had its own racial laws, which prevented Jews from publishing their work or holding any public office (Universities, hospitals, administrations). Levi became a partisan, got arrested by the Fascist Militia, and then was deported to Auschwitz in 1944.

After WWII was over, Levi started publishing memoirs, essays, and short stories. His famous books are If This Is a Man, The Truce, The Periodic Table, and The Drowned and the Saved.

Time flew by. And before I knew it, one year had passed. I remember last year when I was a free man, an outlaw, but still a free man. I had a name, and I had a family. I had an engaged anxious mind and a healthy body full of vigor. I’ve been thinking about all sorts of things afar like mirages. My faith in fate was as uncompromising as stupid. Killing and dying were strange things to me. Something that only belongs to the books. I had pleasant and sorrowful days, but I regret them all, they were full of good; I saw the future before me… Now, all is left from my irredeemable life is merely a piece of me, barely enough to bear the hunger and the cold. I’m not alive enough to prevail, to eliminate myself.

Kuhn has lost his mind. Doesn’t he see Beppo, the Greek next-door who is 20 years old, the gas chamber is hosting him after tomorrow? Beppo knows it. He stares at the lamp without making a sound, and without any thought inside of his skull. Doesn’t Kuhn realize that he’s next? Doesn’t he understand that no prayer, no redemption, no divine punishments, nothing in the hands of humans could ever make up for this abomination? If I were God, I’d trample on Kuhn’s prayer.

If lagers had lasted longer, they would have sown the seed to a new vernacular, exceptionally sour. The one that is lacking us to explain what it’s like to struggle every single day in the howling wind and the sleet. Under zero, a shirt and a jacket on the back, and underwear, and cotton pants on the waist. Within the body, there is nothing but hunger, feebleness, and the consciousness that the end is near…

This is Hell. In this world, this is what Hell looks like. It’s a big empty room. And here we are on our feet, and here is the dripping tap. Water is draining, and we are not allowed to drink it. We are waiting for something that can only be horrible. But, nothing happens; still, nothing happens. How to think? We can’t. It’s like we were already among the dead…

Varlam Chamalov

1907–1982

The Russian journalist writer was deported to the Kolyma Gulag in 1937, for having supported a Trotskyist-sympathizing group, and not holding back when it comes to criticizing Stalin. He survived the cold, the forced-labor, and was released 15 years later.

After 20 years of work, he published his greatest book, Kolyma Tales, a collection of short stories about his non-life in the Kolyma concentration camp.

Prison is freedom. It’s perhaps the only place where people get to speak their mind without fear. They get some peace of mind; their bodies rest too; there is no hard labor in prison. But there, in the Gulag, every minute of existence means something.

I precisely recall how calm I was, prepared for the worst. Yet, somehow my heart was pounding inside my chest, against my will. And I looked away and said: They brought us here to die.

In the Kolyma camps, work stopped when the temperature reached under -55°C. We had our ways to spot that 56th degree, we saw the spit freezing in the air, and the frost whispered. Because the frost had a language. It spoke in Yakut, the tongue of the stars. We were taught this language quickly and cruelly.

I had learned long ago how to fall asleep before my feet got to warm up. The camp doesn’t grant you a time out.

Kolyma has engraved its words and left its marks on the faces of its guests; it didn’t spare anyone. Kolyma carved some extra wrinkles on those faces.

Charlotte Delbo

1913–1985

The French Jewish writer was very active in political groups. She was working for the French Resistance against the Vichy Regime and Nazis. Delbo was arrested, then deported to Auschwitz in 1943.

The Holocaust survivor published a trilogy between 1965 and 1971, called Auschwitz And After. I highly recommend you reading None Of Us Will Return.

By spring, Men and women spread the ashes on the drained marshes. They fertilize the land with human phosphate. They have bags hung upon their waists, and they plunge their hands inside where the human bones dust lies. They throw it in a trice, and the wind brings it back to their faces. By night, they’re are white as snow, except for the wrinkles, where the sweat had trickled.

Every morning, she comes and stands right next to me, hoping I’d leave her a drop or two left deep in my lunch pail. What would I give her from my water? She’s dying either way. She waits, her eyes are begging, and I look away. Life returns to my body, and I’m ashamed. And every morning, I’m numb to her pleading gaze, and to her wan lips. And as I drink, I fill myself with shame.

Don’t look over there. Why are you looking over there? Implore Yvonne. Her wide-open eyes were staring at the corpse that was still alive. Eat your soup, they don’t need anything anymore.

I came back from a world which I haven’t really left And I don’t know anymore which of these two worlds is true Tell me I came back for real from the other world To me, I’ve never left I’m still there and I’m dying there

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

1934-

I haven’t had the chance to read her work, but it is definitely on my list.

Farewell to Manzanar portrays the story of her family before, during, and after WWII. After the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, the U.S government deported Japenese-Americans to internment camps. Jeanne Wakatsuki tells her experience in Manzanar Camp.

She co-writes the memoir along with her husband, James D. Houston.

You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals. Of course, for such a thing to happen, there has to be a kind of acquiescence on the part of the victims, some submerged belief that this treatment is deserved, or at least allowable.

Now she wanted for me the same thing I thought I wanted. Acceptance, in her eyes, was simply another means for survival.

He had become a man without a country. The land of his birth was at war with America; yet after 35 years here, he was still prevented by law from becoming an American citizen. He was suddenly a man with no rights who looked exactly like the enemy.

I knew ahead of time that if someone looked at me with hate, I would have to allow it, to swallow it, because something in me, something about me deserved it.

Author X

The Memoirs regarding Xinjiang concentration camps in China:

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The author translated most of the quotes from French to English.