" It is this undercurrent of ‘anti-creation’ and ‘definitive evil’ that makes the destruction of Europe’s towns and cities so disturbing to contemplate. What is implied in all the descriptions of this time, but never overtly stated, is that behind the physical devastation is something far worse. The ‘skeletons’ of houses and framed pictures sticking out of the rubble of Warsaw are highly symbolic: hidden beneath the ruins, both literally and metaphorically, there was a separate human and moral disaster. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II