"Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment, despite all logic; and for all that, compassion itself eludes logic.

Perhaps it is necessary that it can be so; if we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live."

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"the despised crowd of seniors was prone to recognise in the new arrival a target on which to vent its humiliation, to find compensation at his expense, to build for itself and at his expense a figure of a lower rank on whom to discharge the burden of the offences received from above.

It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism was, sanctifies its victims: on the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them similar to itself, and this all the more when they are available, blank, and lack a political or moral armature.""

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"those in whom one hoped to find future allies, was so harsh as to cause the immediate collapse of one's capacity to resist. For many it was lethal, indirectly or even directly: it is difficult to defend oneself against a blow for which one is not prepared.

...concentrationary system even from its origins (which coincide with the rise to power of Nazism in Germany) had the primary purpose of shattering the adversaries' capacity to resist: for the camp management, the new arrival was an adversary by definition, whatever the label attached to him might be, and he must immediately be demolished to make sure that he did not become an example or a germ of organised resistance."

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“The person who has inflicted the wound pushes the memory deep down, to be rid of it, to alleviate the feeling of guilt.

indeed the need, to separate evil from good, to be able to take sides, to repeat Christ's gesture on Judgement Day: here the righteous, over there the reprobates. The young above all demand clarity, a sharp cut; their experience of the world being meagre, they do not like ambiguity.

...expected to find a terrible but decipherable world...

The world into which one was precipitated was terrible, yes, but also indecipherable: it did not conform to any model, the enemy was all around but also inside, the 'we' lost its limits, the contenders were not two, one could not discern a single frontier but rather many confused, perhaps
innumerable frontiers, which stretched between each of us.

the hoped-for allies, except in special cases, were not there;"

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