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"My father was a cultured man, rather unsentimental. He rarely displayed his feelings, not even within his family, and was more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin."
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"Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him, he liked to say. Therein lies true dialogue. Man asks and god replies. But we don't understand his replies. We cannot understand them. Because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remind there until we die. The real answers, Eliezer, you will find only within yourself."
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"You cannot understand. I was saved miraculously. I succeeded in coming back. Where did I get my strength? I wanted to return to Sighet to describe to you my death so that you might ready yourselves while there is still time. Life? I no longer care to live. I am alone. But I wanted to come back to warn you. Only no one is listening to me..."
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"Three days later, a new decree: every Jew had to wear the yellow star."
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"All Jews, outside! Hurry!" They were followed by Jewish police... The Hungarian police used their rifle butts, their clubs to indiscriminately strike old men and women, children and cripples."
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"My father was crying. It was the first time I saw him cry. I had never thought it was possible."
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"There are eighty of you in the car, If anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs."
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"Fire! I see a fire!" Her little boy was crying, clinging to her skirt, trying to hold her hand: "It's nothing, Mother! There's nothing there... Please sit down."
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“Men to the left! Women to the right!” Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words.”
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"I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?”
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"I thought of us as damned souls wandering through the void, souls condemned to wander through space until the end of time, seeking redemption, seeking oblivion, without any hope of finding either.”
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"I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked."
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"Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute Justice.”
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“At that moment in time, all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my crust of stale bread. The bread, the soup- those were my entire life. I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time”
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“What are You, my God? I thought angrily. How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith, their anger, their defiance? What does Your grandeur mean, Master of the Universe, in the face of all this cowardice, this decay, and this misery? Why do you go on troubling these poor people/s wounded minds, their ailing bodies?"
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“We came back from very far away. I looked up at my fathers face, trying to glimpse a simple or something like it on his stricken face. But there was nothing. Not the shadow of an expression. Defeat.”
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“I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had forbidden me to do so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast, I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him.
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“What if he had wanted to be rid of his father? He had felt his father growing weaker and believing that the end was near, had thought by this separation to free himself of a burden that could diminish his own chance for survival.
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“I shall never know. All I can say is that I prevailed {against death}. I succeeded in digging a hole in that wall of dead and dying people, a small hole through which I could drink a little air.”
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“Listen to me kid. Don’t forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place,it is every man for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even your father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone."
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"No prayers were said over his tomb. No candlelit in his memory. His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered.”