Mike Eggs

“The ceremony was fast so we wouldn't be caught. When it was over, the men all whispered 'Mazel tov' and climbed back onto their shelves. I went up to the boy and pressed the wooden horse into his hands, the only present I could give him. The boy looked at me with big, round eyes. Had I ever been so young?

'We are alive,' I told him. 'We are alive, and that is all that matters. We cannot let them tear us from the pages of the world.'

I said it as much for me as for him. I said it in memory of Uncle Moshe, and my mother and father, and my aunts and other uncles and cousins. The Nazis had put me in a gas chamber. I had thought I was dead, but I was alive. I was a new man that day, just like the bar mitzvah boy. I was a new man, and I was going to survive.”
― Alan Gratz, Prisoner B-3087

“Life is but a river. It has no beginning, no middle, no end. All we are, all we are worth, is what we do while we float upon it — how we treat our fellow man.”
― Alan Gratz, Prisoner B-3087

“And you wanted to escape,' a man near me whispered to another man. 'You wanted to run off into the woods and fight. But do you see? Do you see what the rest of them think about us? These people would sell you back to the Nazis for a sack of potatoes and then toast you at their dinner table.”
― Alan Gratz, Prisoner B-3087

“If I had known what the next six years of my life were going to be like, I would have eaten more. I wouldn’t have complained about brushing my teeth, or taking a bath, or going to bed at eight o’clock every night. I would have played more. Laughed more. I would have hugged my parents and told them I loved them.”
― Alan Gratz, Prisoner B-3087