Sublime

But as my fellow survivors taught me, you can live to avenge the past, or you can live to enrich the present. You can live in the prison of the past, or you can let the past be the springboard that helps you reach the life you want now.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that 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 circumstan

I was very happy to be the personally appointed physician to His Honor the Capo, and to march in the first row at an even pace.

So I began by mentioning the most trivial of comforts first. I said that even in this Europe in the sixth winter of the Second World War, our situation was not the most terrible we could think of. I said that each of us had to ask himself what irreplaceable losses he had suffered up to then. I speculated that for most of them these losses had reall

she is awake to her blood loss and therefore just beginning to live.

Survivors don’t have time to ask, “Why me?” For survivors, the only relevant question is, “What now?”

Our capacity to choose our response is evergreen and can’t be taken from us. It is always with us, and from it we can draw great strength.

the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.