Synopsis: A story of an Italian Jew holocaust survivor.
Key Takeaways
Page 20 – Or even – absurdly – to be in conformity with the law
Page 21 – If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?
Page 23 – Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief.
Page 24 – There are few men who know how to go their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect
Page 28 – Arbeit Macht Frei, work gives freedom
Page 33 – For he who loses all, often easily loses himself
Page 34 – Everyone will treat with respect the number from 30,000 to 80,000, there are only a few hundred left and they represented the few survivals from the polish ghettos. It is as well to watch out in commercial dealings with a 116,000 or a 117,000, they now number only about forty, but they represent the Greeks of Salonica
Page 42 – the problem of the remote future has grown pale to them and has lost all intensity in face of the far more urgent and concrete problems of the near future: how much one will eat today, if it will snow, if there will be coal to unload
Page 77 – Next to us there is a group of Greeks, those admirable and terrible Jews of Salonica, tenacious, thieving, wise, ferocious and united, so determined to live, such pitiless opponents in the struggle for life; those Greeks who have conquered in the kitchens and in the yards, and whom even the Germans respect and the Poles fear. They are in their third year of camp, and nobody knows better than them what the camp means. They now stand closely in a circle, shoulder to shoulder, and sing one of their interminable chants
Page 94 – In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: “to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away. In the Lager, where man is alone and where the struggle for life is reduced to its primordial mechanism, this unjust law is openly in force, is recognized by all.
Page 95 – the result of this pitiless process of natural selection could be read in the statistics of the lager. At Auschwitz, in 1944. Of the old Jewsih prisoners, low numbers, less than 150,000, only a few hundred had survived; not one was an ordinary Haftling, vegetating in the ordinary Kommandos and subsiding on the normal ration. There remained only doctors, tailors, shoemakers, musicians, cooks, young attractive homosexuals, friends or compatriots of some authority in the camp, or they were particularly pitiless, vigorous and inhuman individuals, installed in the posts of Kapos, Blockaltetster, etc; or finally, those whom with fulfilling particular functions, had always succeeded through their astuteness and energy in successfully organizing, gaining in this way, besides material advantages and reputation, the indulagence and esteem of the powerful people in the camp. Whosoever does not know how to become an “Organisator”, “Kombinator”, “Prominent” soon become a musselman.
Page 97 – They are the typical product of the structure of the German Lager: if one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery, exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their comrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept. He will be withdrawn from the common law and will become untouchable; the more power that he is given, the more he will be consequently hateful and hated. When he is given the command of a group of unfortunates, with the right of life or death over them, he will be cruel and tyrannical, because he will understand that if he is not sufficiently so, someone else, judged more suitable, will take over his post. Moreover, his capacity for hatred, unfulfilled in the direction of the oppressors, will double back, beyond all reason, on the oppressed; and he will only be satisfied when he has unloaded onto his underlings the injury received from above
Page 127 – I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid as for having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror, something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving
Page 138 – He does not yet know that it is better to be beaten, because one does not normally die of blow, but one does of exhaustion and badly, and when one grows aware of it, it is already too late
Page 141 – Poor silly Kraus. If he only knew that it is not true, I have really dreamt nothing about him, that he is nothing to me except for a brief moment, nothing like everything is nothing down here, except the hunger inside and the cold and the rain around.
Page 145 – But Haftling 174517 has been promoted as a specialist and has the right to a new shirt and underpants and has to be shaved every Wednesday. No one can boast of understanding the Germans.
Page 147 – They construct shelter and trenches, they repair the damage, they build, they fight, they command, they organize, and they kill. What else could they do? They are Germans. This way of behaviour is not meditated and deliberate but follows from there nature and from the destiny they have chosen.
Page 176 – None of us felt strong enough to walk the one mile to the English camp and return with a load. But indirectly the fortunate expedition proved of advantage to many. The unequal division of goods caused a flourishing of industry and commerce. Our room, with its lethal atmosphere, transformed itself into a factory of candles poured into cardboard moulds, with wicks soaked in boracic acid. The riches of hut 14 absorbed our entire production, paying us in lard and flour.
The Truce
Page 193 – The three, now hollow, words of derision, “Arbeit Macht Frei”, “Work Gives Freedom”
Page 213 – As for myself, I confess that I was impressed mainly by his big sack and his quality of a Salonikite, which, as everyone in Auschwitz knew, was equivalent to a guarantee of highly skilled mercantile ability, and of knowing how to get oneself out of any situation
Page 215 – Then you are a fool, he said calmly. A man who has no shoes is a fool.
Page 215 – Words, said the Greek, anyone can talk. I had temperature of 104, and I didn’t know if it was day or night; but one thing I did know, that I needed shoes and other things, so I got up, and I went as far as the store to study the situation. There was a Russian with a sten-gun in front of the door, but I wanted the shoes, and so I walked to the back, I broke open a small window and I entered. So I got my shoes, and also the sack, and everything that is inside the sack, which will prove useful later on. That is foresight; yours is stupidity. It’s a failure to understand the reality of things.
Page 216 – But the Greek knew how to work all the skives in the world, and while I was speaking he was routing about in the sack hanging on my back
Page 219 – The basis of his ethic was work, which to him was sacred duty, but which understood in a very wide sense. To him, work included everything, but with the condition that it should bring profit without limiting liberty. The concept of work thus included, as well as certain permissible activities, smuggling, theft and fraud (not robbery: he was not a violent man). On the other hand he considered reprehensible, because humiliating, all activities which did not involve initiative or risk or which presupposed a discipline and a hierarchy, any relationship of employment, any services, even if they were well paid, he lumped together as servile work. But it was not servile work to plough your own field, or to sell false antiques to tourists at a port.
Page 224 – When war is waging, one has to think of two things before all others: in first place ones shoes, in the second place of food to eat: not vice versa, as the common herd believes, because he who has shoes can search for food, but the inverse is not true. But the war is over, I objected, and I thought it was over, as did many in those months of truce, in a much more universal sense than one dares to think today. There is always war, replied Mordo Nahum memorably.
Page 235 – One of the most important things I had learnt in Auschwitz was that one must always avoid being a nobody. All roads are closed to a person who appears useless, all are open to a person who has a function, even the most fatuous.
Final Thoughts – An amazing book about a harrowing story. The insights to human behaviours, the darkness of human nature and ability of the human spirit all sine through. A truly great book. 8.5/10
Stranger in Sydney 