Our fate suddenly came to a halt and hung there for a moment, suspended over the abyss it had been racing toward, hung there for a few minutes (five?… - Ida Fink

Sabina was tall and thin, with a startled expression, as if she knew in advance that the world and its inhabitants had nothing good in store for her. (first lines of "Sabina Under the Sacks")

Julia emerged from her reverie and repeated: "By then it was too late." She asked whether I remembered Emanuel, who had escaped from Lodz and wound up staying in the ghetto. Because when she said "it was too late," she was thinking of him. Then she said one more sentence (which she didn't finish) about sudden love in the dying ghetto, powerful and tender, torn from life, the love that Eugenia...I didn't ask any more questions. ("Eugenia")

I recall one image from those days of difficult waiting: the train in the meadow. It was on a day when a thunderstorm was brewing. Under the black, rain-swollen clouds we were raking hay in the fields. A long, serpentine train slithered through the meadow. Watching it disappear from sight, I felt—very clearly, very palpably--the proximity of danger and the futility of my desperate scrambling, my frantic efforts to break out of this closed circle. It was as if a metal band was suddenly squeezing my ribs. The world went quiet and dark. A thick, heavy silence fell. I dropped my rake on the ground, loosened my blouse. I was gasping for breath. (p185)