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The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million QUOTES

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million QUOTES

21 " can’t imagine when she wanted to evoke some positive, pleasant memory of her past, as if there were no point in trying to use more concrete, more descriptive adjectives "

― Daniel Mendelsohn , The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

22 " to gawk, for the entire apartment had been turned into a private archive, a museum of an extinct culture, in which Feuer himself had assembled whatever fragments of Striy’s lost Jewish life he could get his hands on: old prayer books, maps, yellowing documents, municipal surveys, photographs of people he knew "

― Daniel Mendelsohn , The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

23 " distinctiveness, that I had come on this strange and arduous trip. Killed by the Nazis—yes, but by whom, exactly? The dreadful irony of Auschwitz, I realized as we walked through the famous rooms full of human hair, of artificial limbs, of spectacles, of luggage destined to go nowhere, is that the extent of what it shows you is so gigantic that the corporate and anonymous, the sheer scope of the crime, are constantly, paradoxically asserted at the expense of any sense of individual life. Naturally this is useful, since even now, even while the survivors live and tell their stories to people like me, there are, as we know, those who want to minimize the extent of what happened, even to deny that it happened at all, and when you walk around a place like Auschwitz, wander the enormous, vertiginously broad plain where the barracks once stood, and trudge over the great distance to the place where the crematoria were, and from there to "

― Daniel Mendelsohn , The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million