The sad fame of Auschwitz

"It is impossible to write about Auschwitz impersonally. The first duty of Auschwitzers is to make clear just what a camp is. . . . But let them not forget that the reader will unfailingly ask: how did it happen that you survived? . . . Explain, then, how you bought places in the hospital, easy posts; how you shoved the “Muselmänner” into the oven; how you bought women, men; what you did in the barracks, unloading the transports, at the gypsy camp; tell about the daily life of the camp, about the hierarchy of fear, about the loneliness of every man. But write that you, you were the ones who did this. That a portion of the sad fame of Auschwitz belongs to you as well."
—from Tadeusz Borowski’s review of a Holocaust testimony

Quoted in Ruth Franklin's A Thousand Darknesses