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1 " I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity. "
― Nadezhda Mandelstam , Hope Against Hope
2 " On the bottom shelf M. kept the books from his childhood days: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, the Iliad - they are described in The Noise of Time and happened to have been saved by M.'s father. Most of them later perished in Kalinin when I was fleeing from the Germans. The way we have scurried to and fro in the twentieth century, trapped between Hitler and Stalin! "
3 " And after his death - or even before it, perhaps - he lived on in camp legend as a demented old man of seventy who had once written poetry in the outside world and was therefore nicknamed The Poet. And another old man - or was it the same one? - lived in the transit camp of Vtoraya Rechka, waiting to be shipped to Kolyma, and was thought by many people to be Osip Mandelstam - which, for all I know, he may have been. That is all I have been able to find out about the last days, illness and death of Mandelstam. Others know very much less about the death of their dear ones. "