Second World War Quotes

“Fear of joy is the darkest of captivities.”
― Phil Kaye

“What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose?”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek those numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, but our humanity.”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“Exploration! Exploring the past! We students in the camps seminar considered ourselves radical explorers. We tore open the windows and let in the air, the wind that finally whirled away the dust that society had permitted to settle over the horrors of the past. We made sure people could see. And we placed no reliance on legal scholarship. It was evident to us that there had to be convictions. It was just as evident as conviction of this or that camp guard or police enforcer was only the prelude. The generation that had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from its midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“If we wish to understand the role of China in today's global society, we would do well to remind ourselves of the tragic, titanic struggle which that country waged in the 1930s and 1940s not just for its own national dignity and survival, but for the victory of all the Allies, west and east, against some of the darkest forces that history has ever produced.”
― Rana Mitter, China's War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival

“How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power?

Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer to this fundamental question. The state must be large in territory and self-sufficient in economics, with a balance between industry and agriculture that supported a hardily conformist and ideologically motivated citizenry capable of fulfilling historical prophecies - either Stalinist internal industrialization or Nazi colonial agrarianism. Both Hitler and Stalin aimed at imperial autarky, within a large land empire well supplies in food, raw materials, and mineral resources. Both understood the flash appeal of modern materials: Stalin had named himself after steel, and Hitler paid special attention to is production. Yet both Stalin and Hitler understood agriculture as a key element in the completion of their revolutions. Both believed that their systems would prove their superiority to decadent capitalism, and guarantee independence from the rest of the world, by the production of food.

p. 158”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish populations closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans' urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvian, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well.
Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text.

P. 196”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“Dans une guerre il n'y a ni vainqueurs ni vaincus: rien que des victimes.”
― Michel Del Castillo, Tanguy

“The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent. As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War.

pp. 181-182”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“Here is the time of peace, Here is the smile of the ladies, the joyful echos of the spring, the first swallows that come back from the south...We are in a city of Germany, in March, when the snow just starts to melt. Here is the noise of the stream of the snow that flows nearby the ancient streets. And now the peace is over...Here are the drums, the camions, the soldiers footsteps...Can you hear it? Can you hear this slow muffled inexorable patter? A population marching...Among those people the soldier is lost...At this point should be a choir, a kind of religious hymn, that is still unfinished. Now hear! It is the time of the fight.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“A very important man used to visit her sometimes, and I met him too. He loved children and used to dandle me on his knee. This was how the title came about for this book, Uncle Hitler, although in the old German tradition, I called him Uncle Adolf, even though I was not related to him. This was a sign of respect to an older person, which is why I called Frau Eva ‘Aunty Eva’.”
― Alfred Nestor

“This was a particularly spectacular example of the German campaign to gather forced labor in the East, which had begun with the Poles of the General Government, and spread to Ukraine before reaching this bloody climax in Belarus. By the end of the war, some eight million foreigners from the East, most of them Slavs, were working in the Reich. It was a rather perverse result, even by the standards of Nazi racism: German men went abroad and killed millions of "subhumans," only to import millions of other "subhumans" to do the work in Germany that the German men would have been doing themselves - had they not been abroad killing "subhumans." The net effect, setting aside the mass killing abroad, was that Germany became more of a Slavic land than it had ever been in history. (The perversity would reach its extreme in the first months of 1945, when surviving Jews were sent to labor camps in Germany itself. Having killed 5.4 million Jews as racial enemies, the Germans then brought Jewish survivors home to do the work that the killers might have been doing themselves had they not been abroad killing.)

pp. 244-246”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“In October 1941, Mahilue became teh first substantial city in occupied Soviet Belarus where almost all Jews were killed. A German (Austrian) policeman wrote to his wife of his feelings and experiences shooting the city's Jews in the first days of the month. 'During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.'

pp. 205-206”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“A diferencia del estalinismo y otras dictaduras que se apropiaron, sin más, del poder, el nazismo se sustentó en una base popular.”
― Laurence Rees, Auschwitz

“And Lucile thought: "Individual or Community?... My God, that is not a new thing, they invented nothing. Our two millions of death people , during the other war, were sacrificed also for the "feeling of the beehive"! They are dead... and twentyfive years later... What a deception! What an illusion! There are laws that rule the fate of the beehives and populations, that's it! The soul itself of the population, probably, is ruled by laws that we didn't caught, or by mysterious whims. Poor world, so beautiful and so absurd... But what is sure is that in five years, in ten years or twenty this problem, that according to his opinion, is the problem of our time, will no longer exist, will be replaced by others... While this music, this noise of the rain on the glasses, this gloomy creaking of the cedar in the opposite garden, this very sweet moment, so strange in the middle of a war, this won't change... It is eternal...”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“I just can’t see a future, and I believe that might mean it’s because this is all it will be.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Doctor's Daughter

“Better a day too early than a day too late”
― Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

“No one warned me there would eventually be a last tick.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Doctor's Daughter

“Nothing is what it was, and this town is no longer a part of who we are.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Doctor's Daughter

“Living in this nightmare leads nowhere, and I can only continue walking through the tundra of bone-chilling winds, through the snow, toward the endless wall of clouds for so many days in a row before I feel the need to fall to my knees and beg for forgiveness.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Doctor's Daughter

“Your life is not dependent upon anyone else’s. You don’t know what the future holds—none of us do, but I believe it holds more than what we are experiencing now. Hold on, dear. Just hold on. Please.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Doctor's Daughter

“How is beauty ever to be seen through a tarnished lens?”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Doctor's Daughter

“I can’t understand why so many of them seem to be in one place at the same time, but I wonder if a man’s final thought is that they don’t want to be alone when they take their last breath.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Doctor's Daughter

“It’s easier to dream of a future where we are not in a war.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Doctor's Daughter

“Whispers in the dark were something of a nightmare years ago. Today, it’s the only form of communication we have inside these walls.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Doctor's Daughter

“I knew there would come a morning when I would wake up differently than I had become used to, or there would be a night I never fell asleep.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Doctor's Daughter

“Our bodies sway together like an airtight package of greased flesh—side to side and front to back with the waver of every curve the train takes. ”
― Shari J. Ryan

“I have to hand it to you people. Three attempts to kill Hitler in as many weeks and all of them botched. You would think that a group of senior army officers would know how to kill one man. It's what you're supposed to be good at, damn it. None of you seemed to have any trouble slaughtering millions during the Great War. But it seems beyond any of you to actually kill Hitler. Next thing you'll be telling me you were planning to use silver bullets to shoot the bastard.”
― Philip Kerr, Bernie Gunther

“We didn't do a good enough job to make sure something like the Second World War could never happen again. We only looked at one side of the story. There were two monsters, Hitler and Stalin, and the regimes behind them, but in Nurmberg only the Nazis were tried. There was no justice for the Soviet regime.”
― Victoria Amelina

“The industrial infrastructure laid down between 1928 and June 1941 proved (barely) sufficient to sustain the country during the Second World War, but victory came otherwise at a staggering price.”
― Kees Boterbloem, Life in Stalin's Soviet Union