Affinity Konar > Quotes

“Work would never set us free, despite what they'd promised. But beauty? Yes, I thought, beauty might see us past the gates.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“Because you had no power over the fact that I was born, you took from me what I was born with—the person who was my love, the half that made me entire—and now I am lessened into this dull thing, a divided person who will live forever, wandering in search of some nothing, some nowhere, some no-feeling, to mend my pain.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“It was pathetic of me to try, I know, but I had always believed in the world’s ability to right itself, just like that, with a single kindness.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“I love you,” I said into his shoulder. Peter stopped treading on my feet and cocked a half-closed eye at me in suspicion. “You don’t. You could—I think—in time. But you’re just saying that to me because you think you won’t have a chance to say it truthfully someday, aren’t you?” “Yes,” I confessed. “I am.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“Everyone survived by planning. I could see that. I realized that Stasha and I would have to divide the responsibilities of living between us. Such divisions had always come naturally to us, and so there, in the early-morning dark, we divvied up the necessities: Stasha would take the funny, the future, the bad. I would take the sad, the past, the good.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“Auschwitz was built to imprison us. Birkenau was built to kill us. Mere kilometers bridged their attached evils. What this zoo was designed for, I did not know - I could only swear that Pearl and I, we would never be caged.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“The whole world will never look back. And if they do, they’ll probably say that it never really happened.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“But in Auschwitz, I found that the room that really changes you is the one that can make you feel nothing at all. It is the room that says, Come sit in me, and you will know no pain; your suffering isn't real, and your struggles? They're only slightly more real than you are, but not by much. Save yourself, the room advises, by feeling nothing, and if you must feel something, don't doom yourself by showing it.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“We couldn’t imagine the greatness of suffering, how artful and calculated it could be, how it could pluck off the members of a family, one after the other, or show an entire village the face of death in one fell swoop. The”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“Late at night, when Pearl was fast asleep, her consciousness a safe distance from my own, I'd think of these tiny pieces of us and wonder if our feelings remained in them, even though they were mere particles. I wondered if the pieces hated themselves for their participation in the experiments. I imagined that they did. And I longed to tell them that it wasn't their fault, that the collaboration wasn't a willing one, that they'd been stolen, coerced, made to suffer. But then I'd realize how little influence I had over these pieces - after we'd been parted, they answered only to nature and science and the man who called himself Uncle. There was nothing I could do on their numerous, microscopic behalfs.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“It is difficult to realize that part of you might travel for a lifetime with someone you hate, entirely against your own will. You may know what I speak of--maybe someone remembers you when you'd rather be forgotten; maybe someone has a piece of you that is impossible to retrieve.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“But as we sang, we forgot our hunger and our filth, we forgot that we were splittable, faded, dim. For a moment, I even forgot that I was mischling.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“What I knew was small, but it enlarged itself quickly. We were in a place where we'd been meant to die, but we'd lived. For what, I wasn't sure - but I was hardly alone in this.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“she would never look away, not ever, no matter how much it hurt me, because in looking away, she said, we would lose ourselves so thoroughly that our loss would require another name. So,”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“I was a broken half afloat in a great nowhere, and the trains were determined to keep me this way. Let me say this about those days, when the war was still a war, but one soon to end, when refugees were roaming and tanks lay overturned on their backs like great tortoises and one was wise to avoid the marching streams of any soldiers, be they Soviet or German: These trains we never should have trusted again, they appeared to be our only way home. And so people packed themselves into the cars quite willingly and looked the other way when they failed to arrive at their stated destinations. I marveled at our collective belief in an eventual safety.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“The heavens I saw, they h ad never been captured, but they were haunted like I was. Did they know the details of my sister's death? Those stars, theyknew what suffering and renewal meant, they were forged from collapse and dust and fire. That wisdom should have been enough to justify their existence, I'd think. But they insisted on being beautiful too.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“It is one of those things' ,Patient said brightly 'where it gets worse before it gets even worse and then it never really gets better.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“I joined him in stabbing the snow. Have you ever stabbed the snow to make sense of things? It is not something I recommend.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“Stealing doesn’t have the same satisfaction when it’s stealing crumbs. Beating people doesn’t mean much when they’re already beaten.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“We stood for roll call in that early-morning light, our noses twitching in an effort to shake the stench of ash and the unwashed. September's heat lingered in the air. It bounced off us in waves, haloed us with dust. This roll call was the first time I saw all of Mengele's subjects gathered together: the multiples, the giants, the Lilliputs, the limbless, the Jews he's deemed curiously Aryan in appearance.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“What it took to survive--even this was growing, and as it did, it diminished us both.
Pearl, I thought, I never should have made you in charge of the past. I cannot endure this future.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“I love you" I said into his shoulder...."You don.t You could--I think--in time. But you're just saying that to me because you think you won't have a chance to say it truthfully someday, aren't you?"
"Yes," I confessed. "I am." "Then I love you too," he said, and I know we both wished we meant it.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“Tell me,' she said, her eyes trailing the fly's escape over the fence and into the fields, 'what does it feel like - to be of value?'

I said that I didn't know. A lie, obviously. I knew the feeling of value well, I'd known it until Mama and Zayde were taken away, and it still remained - though in an altered form - with Stasha, who valued me more than herself. But I wasn't about to boast of this to Bruna, whose frenzy had enlarged in such a manner that the whole of her quaked. The index finger of her right hand shook the most. She pointed it at a building in the distance, a building that I'd later come to know as one of Mengele's laboratories.

'Please,' she entreated, 'tell me when you understand? I would like to know.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“We could also see birches in the woods beyond the thirteen-foot-high fences. And we could see women prisoners in the adjacent field; if the girls saw their mothers among them, they could throw their bread to them, hoping that they would not loft it back, as our rations were greater than anyone else's in the camp. We could see the labs we were taken to on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, the two-story buildings of brick, but the rest of our view was limited. If someone had cause to pluck us up and take us somewhere, then there was more we might learn of Auschwitz, but otherwise, we did not see the section of camp called Canada, which featured a series of warehouses so overwhelmed with pillaged splendor that the prisoners named it after a country that represented wealth and luxury to them. Inside Canada's structures, our former possessions loomed in stacks: our spectacles, our coats, our instruments, our suitcases, all of it, even down to our teeth, our hair, anything that could be considered necessary to the business of being human. We did not see the sauna where inmates were stripped, or the little white farmhouse whose rooms were passed off as showers. We did not see the luxuriant headquarters of the SS, where parties took place, parties where the women of the Puff were brought in to dance and sit upon Nazi laps. We did not see, and so we believed we already knew the worst. We couldn't image the greatness of suffering, how artful and calculating it could be, how it could pluck off the members of a family, one after the other, or show an entire village the face of death in one fell swoop.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“He leaped onto a pedestal bereft of its statutory, and on this surface he posed and flexed and shook his fist at the God he believed in. Looking at this monument he'd made to our anger, I saw that we were children still, but mercenary children, half-murdered troublers. I had to wonder what such a child looked like. I stalked about the velvets of this tearooms looking for some opportune reflection. But the darkness was unrelenting; the shards of glass said nothing about appearances at all.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“Everywhere we looked there was a duplicate, an identical. All girls. Sad girls, girls from faraway places, girls who could have been our neighborhood's girls. Some of these girls were quiet; they posed like birds on their straw mattresses and studied us. As we walked past them on their perches, I saw the chosen, the ones selected to suffer in certain ways while their other halves remained untouched. In nearly ever pair, one twin had a spine gone awry, a bad leg, a patched eye, a wound, a scar, a crutch.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“Warsaw did not recognize our destructive aims, as it was too possessed by its own restoration to know us. But although it did not note our entry, I trusted the city to host our mission. It had been destroyed like we had been destroyed. It was gutted and drawn; vacancies had been cleared until the city was little more than a cellar, a tomb, a waiting room with a telephone that only said good-bye, but everywhere, I saw people crushing themselves to revive it, I saw them expelling every breath they had into the foundations of the felled synagogues. They had the power specific to natives - they compelled the leaves to remain on the trees, coaxed the flowers to bloom and the skulls to stay in the ground, buried where no dog might unearth them but we had the gifts of outside avengers. While they entrusted the city with life, we were there to ensure a death. Only when Mengele was finished would the leaves remain, the flowers bloom, and the skulls go back to sleep.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“There should have been paintings for us to see. Pictures of things real and not real, of landscapes and people. But in that moment, we could find only a portrait of ruin. We watched a hurricane of black pigeons swoop through a hole in the eaves. The floor opened wide and threatened to swallow us. Where it didn't open, it hosted black pools of water. Light winced across the crumbled walls; rats philosophized from their holes.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“Tears must have been invented for that reason.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling

“And this is where I don't remember. This is where I want to wander my mind back and under, past the smell, past the thump-bump of the boots and the suitcases, toward some semblance of a good-bye. Because we should have seen our loves go missing, we should have been able to watch them leave us, should have known the precise moment of our loss. If only we'd seen their faces turning from us, a flash of eye, a curve of cheek! A face turning - they would never give us that. Still, why couldn't we have had a view of their backs to carry with us, just their backs as they left, only that? Just a glimpse of a shoulder, a flash of woolen coat? For the sight of Zayde's hand, hanging so heavy at his side - for Mama's braid, lifting in the wind!

But where our loved ones should have been, we had only the introduction to this white-coated man, Josef Mengele, the same Mengele who would become, in all his many years of hiding, Helmut Gregor, G. Helmuth, Fritz Ulmann, Fritz Hollman, Jose Mengele, Peter Hochbicler, Ernst Sebastian Alves, Jose Aspiazi, Lars Balltroem, Friedrcih Edler von Breitenbach, Fritz Fischer, Karl Gueske, Ludwig Gregor, Stanislaus Prosky, Fausto Rindon, Fausto Rondon, Gregor Schklastro, Heinz Stobert, and Dr. Henrique Wollman.”
― Affinity Konar, Mischling