Best 160 quotes in «world war ii quotes» category

Ah, my dear friend, cheer up... After all, we have peace! And because there is peace, the occupiers can't behave so abominably anymore. All right, we're not free. But we are used to that, Mr. Kujawski. After all we were both born into slavery, and we will die in it. Oh yes, at first they'll exploit us ruthlessly. Fourteen hours of slave labor a day. A bowl of watery soup. Whippings, beatings... But that will pass with time. Because there is peace, they won't have a chance to get any new slaves. They'll have to take good care of those have already. Cheer up, dear Mr. Kujawski... [...] Arbeit macht frei, work makes man free, and it makes him especially so in the sunshine of European peace. We will lack only one thing. Only one! The right of dissent. The right to say out loud that we want a free and independent Poland, that we want to brush our teeth and go on holiday in our own way, conceive children and work our own way, think in our own way, live and die. This is the one thing you will find missing in the sunshine of European peace, which you, my friend, hold to be the highest good.

And she felt the beauty in the music now, drank it in with tears streaming down her face. Never had she been so naked in worship before her Creator, allowing the adoration to bleed out her very fingertips onto the strings, playing her heart's cry for every single lost soul, for the loss of innocence every generation to come would possess as a result of what happened at the killing fields of Auschwitz.

Asperger's actions are perhaps more reflective of the nature of perpetration in the Third Reich than those of more prominent figures. The Reich's systems of extermination depended upon people like Asperger, who maneuvered themselves, perhaps uncritically, within their positions. Individuals such as Asperger were neither committed killers nor even directly involved in the moment of death. Yet, in the absence of murderous convictions, they made the Reich's killing systems possible.

As with millions of others, Adeline Perry and her two young daughters endured the horrors of the Second World War in NAZI Germany. Following her death and armed with her manuscript, Captain Hank Bracker and his wife Ursula, Adeline’s youngest daughter, followed in Adeline’s footsteps to better understand the ordeal she experienced. Realizing that this book was the only way that her story could be preserved, Captain Hank took on the task of recording it. Ursula’s brother-in-law and stepsister, Peter Klett and his wife Jutta drove them to many of the places described in this book including Bischoffsheim, Strasbourg and Rosheim, in what was known as Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen during World War II and which is now recognized as the administrative territory of Alsace-Moselle, France. He found the still existing bunker in Feudenheim and talked to people in Mannheim, Überlingen and Bischoffsheim who still remembered some of the details of the incidents in this book. Ursula’s sister Brigitte wrote her own manuscripts which helped fill in some previously unknown facts. “Suppressed I Rise” is an insight into how individual people’s lives were adversely affected by the insane acts of one man and the country he decimated.

At the laboratory, Turing designed the first relatively complete electronic stored-program digital computer for code breaking in 1945. Darwin deemed it too ambitious, however, and after several years Turing left in disgust. When the laboratory finally built his design in 1950, it was the fastest computer in the world and, astonishingly, had the memory capacity of an early Macintosh built three decades later.

Alas, all that sound and fury disguised the fact that on Omaha Beach at least, the bombs fell too long, the rockets fell too short, and the naval gunfire was too brief.

Although Higgins's men had finally received some badly needed supplies, some of his wounded were becoming critical, and the overall health of his troops continued to ebb. Meanwhile, the price among the 442nd's battalions paid to reach Higgins's men had reached gut-wrenching levels. And for General Dahlquist, panic would supplant his anger and frustration.

Among other jobs that we did, my brother Bill and I were shoe shine boys in Jersey City and Hoboken during the World War II years. We went from tavern to tavern shining shoes for ten cents and hopefully a generous tip. The Hoboken waterfront bristled with starkly looming, grey hulled Liberty ships. Secured to the piers facing River Street, they brandished their ominous cannons towards what I thought was City Hall. An unappreciated highlight was when I shined Frank Sinatra’s shoes at a restaurant on Washington Street, just west from the Clam Broth House. There was no doubt but that Hoboken was an exciting place during those years. Years later I met Frank at Jilly's saloon, a lounge on West 52d Street in Manhattan, for a few drinks and a little fun around town. Even though I was an adult by then, he still called me “kid!” It was obvious that Frank Sinatra enjoyed friendly relations with Mafia notables such as Carlo Gambino, “Joe Fish” Fischetti and Sam Giancana. Meyer Lansky was said to have been a friend of Sinatra’s parents in Hoboken. During this time Sinatra spoke in awe about Bugsy Siegel and was in an AP syndicated photograph, seen in many newspapers, with Tommy “Fatso” Marson, Don Carlo Gambino 'The Godfather', and Jimmy 'The Weasel, Fratianno. Little wonder that the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept their eye on Sinatra for almost 50 years. A memo in FBI files revealed that Sinatra felt that he could be of use to them. However, it is difficult to believe that Sinatra would have become an FBI informer, better known as a “rat.” It was in May of 1998 when Sinatra, being treated at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles told his wife Barbara, “I’m losing.” Frank Sinatra died on May 14th at 82 years of age. It is alleged that he was buried with the wedding ring from his ex-wife, Mia Farrow, which she slid unnoticed into his suit pocket during his “viewing.” Aside from his perceived personal and public image, Frank Sinatra’s music will shape his enduring legacy for decades to come. His 100th birthday was celebrated at the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday, July 22, 2015. Somehow Frank will never age and his music will never fade….

Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, 'good time' and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of the living damnation?

As I remember, the worst result of a World War II block was a flood of Argentine Gin. Sensitive martini-boys and Gibson-girls still shudder....

Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?

I was on one of my world 'walkabouts.' It had taken me once more through Hong Kong, to Japan, Australia, and then Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific [one of the places I grew up]. There I found the picture of 'the Father.' It was a real, gigantic Saltwater Crocodile (whose picture is now featured on page 1 of TEETH). From that moment, 'the Father' began to swim through the murky recesses of my mind. Imagine! I thought, men confronting the world’s largest reptile on its own turf! And what if they were stripped of their firearms, so they must face this force of nature with nothing but hand weapons and wits? We know that neither whales nor sharks hunt individual humans for weeks on end. But, Dear Reader, crocodiles do! They are intelligent predators that choose their victims and plot their attacks. So, lost on its river, how would our heroes escape a great hunter of the Father’s magnitude? And what if these modern men must also confront the headhunters and cannibals who truly roam New Guinea? What of tribal wars, the coming of Christianity and materialism (the phenomenon known as the 'Cargo Cult'), and the people’s introduction to 'civilization' in the form of world war? What of first contact between pristine tribal culture and the outside world? What about tribal clashes on a global scale—the hatred and enmity between America and Japan, from Pearl Harbor, to the only use in history of atomic weapons? And if the world could find peace at last, how about Johnny and Katsu?

damaged as to be of no further use. These losses were due

DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger told Whit Burnett... that on D-Day he was carrying six chapters of 'The Catcher in the Rye', that he needed those pages with him not only as an amulet to help him survive but as a reason to survive.

Dear Mr. Beard, On the radio last spring, President Roosevelt said that each and every one of us here on the home front has a battle to fight; We must keep our spirits up. I am doing my best, but in my opinion Liver Gems are a lost cause, because they would take the spirit right out of anyone. So when Mother says it is wrong for us to eat better than our brave men overseas, I tell her that I don't see how eating disgusting stuff helps them in the least. But, Mr. Beard, it is very hard to cook good food when you're only a beginner! When Mother decided it was her patriotic duty to work at the airplane factory, she should have warned me about the recipes. You just can't trust them! Prudence Penny's are so revolting. I want to throw them right into the garbage. Mrs. Davis from next door lent me one of her wartime recipe pamphlets, and I read about liver salmi, which sounded so romantic. But by the time I had cooked the liver for twenty minutes in hot water, cut it into little cubes, rolled them in flour, and sautéed them in fat, I'd made flour footprints all over the kitchen floor. The consommé and cream both hissed like angry cats when I added them. Then I was supposed to add stoned olives and taste for seasoning. I spit it right into the sink.

During World War II the top secret “Norden XV” or “Blue Ox” otherwise known the Army Airforce’s “Norden M Series Bombsights,” were used up to and including the Vietnam War by all American military aircraft with bomb carrying capabilities. This bombsight was considered a “Canonical Tachometric Design” meaning that it had the ability to measure the aircraft's direction and ground speed. In time the Norden improved its original design by using a computer that constantly calculated the aircraft’s flight characteristic and external wind forces to determine the bomb's impact point. When the B-17 Flying Fortress was designed, it came equipped with a Sperry A-3 Autopilot that only corrected angular deviations in the aircraft’s straight and level course. In time most bombsights were replaced by video displays on the instrument panel. Dumb or gravity bombs were mostly replaced with in-flight guidance bombs, such as laser-guided bombs or those using a GPS system. The last combat use of the Norden bombsight was by the US Navy during the covert “Operation Igloo White” mission when OP-2E Neptune aircraft dropped electronic sensors to detect enemy activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Project CHECO Southeast Asia Report was declassified on May 5, 2013.

Gideon conquers, the church conquers, we conquer, because faith conquers. But the victory belongs not to Gideon, the church, or ourselves, but to God. And God's victory means our defeat, our humiliation; it means God's derision and wrath at all human pretensions of might, at humans puffing themselves up and thinking they are somebodies themselves. It means the world and its shouting is silenced, that all our ideas and plans are frustrated; it means the cross. The cross over the world -- that means that human beings, even the most noble, go down to dust whether it suits them or not, and with them all the gods and idols and lords of this world. The cross of Jesus Christ --that means God's bitter mockery of all human grandeur and God's bitter suffering in all human misery, God's lordship over all the world.

History is not always pessimistic for if World War II Europe has taught us anything it is that the rebuilding of cities is possible and the mending of a nation’s spirit can be achieved.

His words held depth, but not enough to make her forget the desire to do something more than just leave the hospital alive. All she could think of now was the pain of running away. She'd left her family, left Prague behind out of fear. And still war had chased her to an ARP shelter in the heart of London. How could she run again? Something mattered in standing up to fight.

Holland surrendered to the Nazis. Belgium surrendered to the Nazis. The Germans marched into Paris. None of these catastrophes managed to shake the general feeling that war in Europe was not in Martin's business. A peacetime draft got the town's attention.

Home? What is home? Home is where a house is that you come back to when the rainy season is about to begin, to wait until the next dry season comes around. Home is where your woman is, that you come back to in the intervals between a greater love - the only real love - the lust for riches buried in the earth, that are your own if you can find them. Perhaps you do not call it home, even to yourself. Perhaps you call them 'my house,' 'my woman,' What if there was another 'my house,' 'my woman,' before this one? It makes no difference. This woman is enough for now. Perhaps the guns sounded too loud at Anzio or at Omaha Beach, at Guadalcanal or at Okinawa. Perhaps when they stilled again some kind of strength had been blasted from you that other men still have. And then again perhaps it was some kind of weakness that other men still have. What is strength, what is weakness, what is loyalty, what is perfidy? The guns taught only one thing, but they taught it well: of what consequence is life? Of what consequence is a man? And, therefore, of what consequence if he tramples love in one place and goes to find it in the next? The little moment that he has, let him be at peace, far from the guns and all that remind him of them. So the man who once was Bill Taylor has come back to his house, in the dusk, in the mountains, in Anahuac. ("The Moon Of Montezuma")

How many remember where they were when the war began on the 1st of September 1939? I remember. I should remember. I started it. My name is Robert Leroy Parker.

[And conversely, Woodrow Wilson finishes dead last.] Yes [...] I think World War I was avoidable for the United States, certainly; we kind of look back on Germany as being 'evil' (because of World War II), but back in World War I it was much more ambiguous who was at fault - and the allies, including our French and British allies and the Russians also were at fault - and after World War I there was a revulsion because the Bolsheviks released their correspondences with Britain and France: Britain and France were trying to grab colonies, and so the American people said, 'We were fighting...we lost all these people in this massive war just to help these people grab territory?' So there was a revulsion at that time; we don't hear that now because we're distant from it. Woodrow Wilson has been elevated as one of the better presidents but I think if you go back and look at it, the war was avoidable...and of course Woodrow Wilson helped bring Hitler to power by insisting on the abdication of the Kaiser after World War I - which was totally unnecessary. Germany was a constitutional monarchy before the war, and was vilified. It was actually the most aggressive state in Europe [...] and there were many things wrong with the Kaiser's personality, but I think Germany is unnecessarily vilified for that war.

I can’t recite the chronology or elaborate on the facts. I can’t explain the reasons or defend how we lived our lives. What I can tell you is how the events of 1933 sowed the seeds that fundamentally changed our future, that there was little hand-wringing or emotion, that circumstances were beyond control, that there was no recourse or appeal. I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.

I don't know whether Western listeners would find my words embarrassing—it is difficult for me to judge that kind of reaction—but I would put it this way: those people who have lived in the most terrible conditions, on the frontier between life and death, be it people from the West or from the East, all understand that between good and evil there is an irreconcilable contradiction, that it is not one and the same thing—good or evil—that one cannot build one's life without regard to this distinction. I am surprised that pragmatic philosophy consistently scorns moral considerations; and nowadays in the Western press we read a candid declaration of the principle that moral considerations have nothing to do with politics. I would remind you that in 1939 England thought differently. If moral considerations were not applicable to politics, then it would be incomprehensible why England went to war with Hitler's Germany. Pragmatically, you could have gotten out of the situation, but England chose the moral course, and experienced and demonstrated to the world perhaps the most brilliant and heroic period in its history.

I find it difficult to remember all of the details of our journey after leaving Mannheim. At the time I was depressed and extremely tired. The children must have felt the same way since they were just there. The unflappable joy they always demonstrated and the sparkle in their eyes was missing. An unspeakable sadness had settled in. Being children they were being denied the right to be happy, to be able to celebrate their youth and look forward to a promising future. Now they hardly ever complained or cried. They sometimes said that they were hungry and asked if we had food, but accepted the fact that we were all hungry most of the time. My only vivid recollection is that we were headed by train towards the Bodensee, or what is called Lake Constance, near the Swiss border. The only reason we were going there was that it seemed rural, and more distant from the advancing front and active war zone. Perhaps I felt that neutral Switzerland was close by and if need be we could appeal to someone’s compassion and escape. Of course this was only a fleeting thought and could never happen….

I just can’t comprehend, that you, Borge, of all people, couldn’t keep your mouth shut.

In 1939, Hitler expanded the German Navy and, in violation of the Munich Agreement, occupied parts of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Germany then established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. This protectorate included those portions of Czechoslovakia that had not already been incorporated into Germany. On August 30, 1939, the German Reich issued an ultimatum to Poland concerning the Polish Corridor and the Free City of Danzig. On September 1st, without waiting for a response to its ultimatum, Germany invaded Poland. Much to Hitler’s surprise, England honored its treaty with Poland. Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany, thereby ushering in another World War. Officially, “The Second World War” in Europe was started by the German Reich when it attacked Poland, although at the time Germany blamed the Treaty of Versailles.

Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can't feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is beautiful.

In Paris, I found myself surrounded by Germans; they were all over the place. They played music, and people would go and listen to them! All along rue de Rivoli, as far as you could see from place de la Concorde, there were enormous swastika banners five or six floors high. I just thought, This is impossible. Imagine that someone comes into your home—someone you don’t like—he settles down, gives orders: “Here we are, we’re at home now; you must obey.” To me that was unbearable.

In political affairs illusions are usually the product of a failure to appreciate change; but such failure-usually a necessary and perhaps salutary part of human affairs-becomes, when the change is very fast, not a stabilizing conservatism but a form of deception resembling lunacy.

In the end the war was Hitler's war. It was not perhaps the war he wanted. But it was the war he was prepared to risk if he had to. Nothing could deter him...He was no longer prepared to wait on events. He needed to force them to manipulate them to manufacture incidents to create pretexts for action.

It grey louder. Louder. They were singing, singing at the top of their lungs. Andrius joined, and then my brother and the gray-haired man. And finally, the bald man joined in, singing out national anthem. 'Lithuania, land of heroes...

I think that is not true," Uncle Henrik said. "I think you are like your mama,and like your papa, and like me. Frightened, but determined, and if the time came to be brave, I quite sure you would be very, very brave." "But," he added, "it is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything. And so your mama does not know everything.Neither do I. We only know what we need to know." "Do you understand what I am saying?" he asked, looking into her eyes. Annemarie frowned. She wasn't sure.What did bravery mean? She had been very frightened the day--not long ago though now it seemed far in the past-- when the soldier had stopped her on the street and asked questions in his rough voice. And she had not known that the German were going to take away the Jews. And so, when the soldiers asked, looking at Ellen that day, "What is the name of your friend?"she had been able to handle him, even though she was frightened. If she had known everything, it would have not been so easy to be brave.

It is well to remember that the stomach governs the world," wrote Churchill when planning the feeding of his troops on the north-west Indian frontier at the tail-end of the nineteenth century.

It is when we finally realize the futility of violence and the invalidity of war will we, the people of this world finally wake up!

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled.

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

Brick walls towered over her. Decrepit staircases crowded about her. Nothing had changed. The line there, the lessons there, the rape there. Shouldn't the place be crimson with blood and black with shame?

Earlier in the morning Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines had attacked eastward into the ruins of Shuri Castle and had raised the Confederate flag. When we learned that the flag of the Confederacy had been hoisted over the very heart and soul of Japanese resistance, all of us Southerners cheered loudly. The Yankees among us grumbled, and the Westerners didn’t know what to do. Later we learned that the Stars and Stripes that had flown over Guadalcanal were raised over Shuri Castle, a fitting tribute to the men of the 1st Marine Division who had the honor of being first into the Japanese citadel.

Eighty years ago on July 2, 1937 Amelia Earhart, the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, disappeared while attempting to circumnavigate the world in a Lockheed Model 10- Electra. Her expedition, sponsored by Purdue University, a public research university located in West Lafayette, Indiana, was brought to an end when this daring woman aviator and her navigator and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared near Howland Island in the central part of the Pacific Ocean. Since that time it was generally assumed that she had crashed at sea and simply disappeared beneath the waves of an unforgiving ocean. All the speculation ended on Sunday July 9, 2017 when Shawn Henry, a former executive assistant director for the FBI, brought world attention on the “History Channel” to a photograph that apparently shows Earhart and Noona on the dock of Jaluit Atoll, overlooking the SS Kaoshu towing a barge, with what looks like the Electra they had been flying. The intensive research and analysis that Shawn Henry and his team conducted presents compelling evidence and leaves no doubt but that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan had survived the crash. The team’s research also presents evidence that Amelia Earhart was held as a prisoner of war on the island of Saipan by the Japanese and died while in their custody.

Even in former days, Korea was known as the 'hermit kingdom' for its stubborn resistance to outsiders. And if you wanted to create a totally isolated and hermetic society, northern Korea in the years after the 1953 'armistice' would have been the place to start. It was bounded on two sides by the sea, and to the south by the impregnable and uncrossable DMZ, which divided it from South Korea. Its northern frontier consisted of a long stretch of China and a short stretch of Siberia; in other words its only contiguous neighbors were Mao and Stalin. (The next-nearest neighbor was Japan, historic enemy of the Koreans and the cruel colonial occupier until 1945.) Add to that the fact that almost every work of man had been reduced to shards by the Korean War. Air-force general Curtis LeMay later boasted that 'we burned down every town in North Korea,' and that he grounded his bombers only when there were no more targets to hit anywhere north of the 38th parallel. Pyongyang was an ashen moonscape. It was Year Zero. Kim Il Sung could create a laboratory, with controlled conditions, where he alone would be the engineer of the human soul.

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

For the greatest part the American bombardiers, using the Norden bombsight with its autopilot, hit their target. However on nights with poor visibility anything was possible. As the bombs fell, people pushed their way down the path towards the square concrete entrance to the bunker. In their frantic haste to get to safety they knocked each other down. Stepping onto each other, many people, especially the older ones, fell as they tried to get out of harm’s way, and were crushed. The pushing and shoving was relentless as the poor screaming people were trampled in the dark. My best friend Anna tried to bring some clothing with her. She was among those trampled and died when the sharp end of a coat hanger pierced her throat. The horror of it all brought the worst out in people, who behaved worse than animals. It wasn’t until the air raid was over that the wardens undertook the grim task of removing the bodies of these unfortunate victims. Photo Caption: The actual bunker in Mannheim, Germany.

How many rapes occurred inside the walls of the main camp of Ravensbrück is hard to put a figure to: so many of the victims—already, as Ilse Heinrich said, half dead—did not survive long enough after the war to talk about it. While many older Soviet women were reluctant to talk of the rape, younger survivors feel less restraint today. Nadia Vasilyeva was one of the Red Army nurses who were cornered by the Germans on the cliffs of the Crimea. Three years later in Neustrelitz, northwest of Ravensbrück, she and scores of other Red Army women were cornered again, this time by their own Soviet liberators intent on mass rape. Other women make no excuses for the Soviet rapists. ‘They were demanding payment for liberation,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘The Germans never raped the prisoners because we were Russian swine, but our own soldiers raped us. We were disgusted that they behaved like this. Stalin had said that no soldiers should be taken prisoner, so they felt they could treat us like dirt.’ Like the Russians, Polish survivors were also reluctant for many years to talk of Red Army rape. ‘We were terrified by our Russian liberators,’ said Krystyna Zając. ‘But we could not talk about it later because of the communists who had by then taken over in Poland.’ Nevertheless, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs and French survivors all left accounts of being raped as soon as they reached the Soviet lines. They talked of being ‘hunted down’, ‘captured’ or ‘cornered’ and then raped. In her memoirs Wanda Wojtasik, one of the rabbits, says it was impossible to encounter a single Russian without being raped. As she, Krysia and their Lublin friends tried to head east towards their home, they were attacked at every turn. Sometimes the approach would begin with romantic overtures from ‘handsome men’, but these approaches soon degenerated into harassment and then rape. Wanda did not say she was raped herself, but describes episodes where soldiers pounced on friends, or attacked them in houses where they sheltered, or dragged women off behind trees, who then reappeared sobbing and screaming. ‘After a while we never accepted lifts and didn’t dare go near any villages, and when we slept someone always stood watch.

I can’t recite the chronology or elaborate on the facts. I can’t explain the reasons or defend how we lived our lives. What I can tell you is how the events of 1933 sowed the seeds that fundamentally changed our future, that there was little hand-wringing or emotion, that circumstances were beyond control, that there was no recourse or appeal. I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal. Ralph Webster, A Smile in One Eye: a Tear in the Other

I find it difficult to remember all of the details of our journey after leaving Mannheim. At the time I was depressed and extremely tired. The children must have felt the same way since they were just there. The unflappable joy they always demonstrated and the sparkle in their eyes was missing. An unspeakable sadness had settled in. Being children they were being denied the right to be happy, to be able to celebrate their youth and look forward to a promising future. Now they hardly ever complained or cried. They sometimes said that they were hungry and asked if we had food, but accepted the fact that we were all hungry most of the time. My only vivid recollection is that we were headed towards the Bodensee, or what is called Lake Constance, near the Swiss border. The only reason we were going there was that it seemed rural, and more distant from the advancing front and active war zone. Perhaps I felt that neutral Switzerland was close by and if need be we could appeal to someone’s compassion and escape. Of course this was only a fleeting thought and could never happen….

If you can only say so much you know I always look for letters and don't think they are ever dull - I have saved every one - I think they should be kept to hand down to the grandchildren," 26 March 1943

Imagine if you can how I felt when I arrived in Strasbourg. I could still vividly remember the cruel treatment I had received in this same railroad station just a couple of months earlier. I tried not to do anything that would attract attention to myself and strove to be inconspicuous. There were still crowds of people trying to get home, but things seemed different. From the Rosheim train station, it was a long, tiring walk back to Bischoffsheim, and as I walked I noticed that people were scurrying by and I just sensed that something terrible had happened. As I rounded the corner and started down the main street, I could see a crowd clustered around the gate to the Ortsgruppenleiter’s farmyard. It all looked very familiar since I had lived in the apartment across the street but nothing prepared me for what I was about to see. Heavens, what a terrible sight! I almost screamed but somehow managed to keep quiet and stifled any sounds that I normally would have made. There on the barn door was Herr Erdmann, crucified! He was still alive and twitching as he hung from some large rusty nails that had been driven into his flesh.

In Britain, these Jewish refugees were greeted with a mixture of grudging acceptance by some and open hostility by others.