The city, which should be the symbol and center of civilization, can also be made to function as a concentration camp. This is one of the significant discoveries of contemporary political science.

Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths.

It was like a concentration camp and I have bad memories because it was the first time I saw human beings lose everything, even dignity [...]. Thank God no one tried to hit me or put me down, there was no sexual violence towards me because our group stayed together, we made business with nobody and just tried to survive. I knew I never wanted to go back.

The idea of a concentration camp is excellent.

When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?

For most of us, concentration camps and extermination camps are the culmination of the persecution of the Jews, a devastating symbol of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. Much more shocking, in my eyes, however, is the calm and calculated origin of the tragedy that was soon to take concrete form in Auschwitz and other extermination camps at a convivial lunch-time meeting at Wannsee in Berlin on 20 January 1942, a meeting that had already come to a close by early afternoon of the same day. The events that took place in those few hours, however, represented an unprecedented case of meticulously organized mass extermination of millions of victims, the birth of a terrifying idea thought up by the minds of educated people in an ostensibly civilized European country with long traditions.

The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

Listen to me, kid. Don't forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every many for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even you father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone. Let me give you good advice: stop giving your ration of bread and soup to your old father. You cannot help him anymore. And you are hurting yourself. In fact, you should be getting his rations...

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

…in this place everything is forbidden, not for hidden reasons, but because the camp has been created for that purpose.

In every part of the world, wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of mankind, and equality among people, you move toward the concentration camp system, and it is a road on which it is difficult to halt.

Each of us has his own inner concentration camp... We must deal with, with forgiveness and patience-as full human beings, as we are and what we will become.

The seemingly endless book of victim names. The train tracks which brought the victims to their final destination. The gas chambers. Nothing can replace standing at this site, seeing the grotesque reality of the day-to-day function of an extermination camp.

... carry out merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards; unreliable elements to be locked up in a concentration camp outside the town.