12 quotes
The rule of the game was never assume that anybody, however honorable, would be able to stand up under torture.
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
One of the absolute rules I learned in the war was, don't know anything you don't need to know, because if you ever get caught they will get it out of you.
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do.
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery.
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
If those papers had been in my pocket I would have never lived to be seventy. I have led a strange life, a set of complete coincidences.
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
I don't sit here conquering great resistance to talk. It is not my way.
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
For several months I was incapable of feeling anything, completely inaccessible to my feelings — I did not laugh, I did not cry.
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot. I learned, because there was no interruption. I had access to myself, to my thinking.
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
I was lucky because the same week that I went to prison the Americans crossed the Rhine and cut off the northern part of Holland, so there was no longer any possibility of being shipped out to a concentration camp.
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
I knew all the time I was going to get through the war. It was completely irrational, a silly idea, but I was not going to lie down and get myself killed. I was going to get out of it.
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
Most of my family was killed. All of my father's and mother's sisters and brothers and their children, my sister and my old grandfather, they're all gone. Four out of five Jews in Holland never came back after the war — 80 percent.
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter.
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)