Yanek Gruener Quotes

“I wouldn’t have complained about brushing my teeth, or taking a bath, or going to bed at eight o’clock every night. I would have played more. Laughed more. I would have hugged my parents and told them I loved them. But I was ten years old, and I had no idea of the nightmare that was to come. None of us did.”

“He was my father, and I wanted to believe him, but I wasn’t so sure anymore. It was January 1941. The Germans ruled Kraków. I was twelve years old. And for the first time in my life, I had begun to doubt my father.”

“If I had known what the next six years of my life were going to be like, I would have eaten more.”

“You are now responsible for your own sins, but also for your own goodness. Remember what the Talmud teaches: Life is but a river. It has no beginning, no middle, no end. All we are, all we are worth, is what we do while we float upon it—how we treat our fellow man. Remember this, and a good man you will be.”

“In the place of my pain, I felt the stirring of determination. I would not give up. I would not turn myself in. No matter what the Nazis did to me, no matter what they took from me, I would survive.”

“I was all alone in the world, but I would survive on my own.”

“We were going to survive, the two of us. We were going to survive—the last two men in the Gruener family written on the pages of the world.”

“I was an animal to them, a pack mule. But beasts were never treated so poorly. Working animals were expensive. They had value. I was a Jew. We were lower than animals.”