Rolf Schaefer

“But hazards on Gorée aren't confined to the insect variety. Be wary of the soldiers of the British garrison – most are unruly servicemen or criminals here only because they were offered the option of serving in Africa as an alternative to a flogging, or worse.”
― Anonymous

“Judging by the deplorable state in which the garrison troops can often be found, alcohol is never in short supply. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for water. The island has only two tiny springs, so most drinking water has been collected during the rainy season and stored in cisterns for use in drier periods.”
― Anonymous

“In an extraordinary article in the Daily Express, Major R. Crisp stated that the ordinary German soldiers he used to come across had been replaced by an army of fanatical fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who appeared incapable of anything but brutality. There is nothing that is decent, or gentle, or humble to be read in them. Everything that is beastly and lustful and cruel. This is a generation of men trained deliberately in barbarity, trained to execute the awful orders of a madman. Not a clean thought has ever touched them … Every German born since 1920 is under this satanic spell. The younger they are the more fiercely impregnated are they with its evil poison. Every child born under the Hitler regime is a lost child. It is a lost generation. The newspaper article went on to suggest that it was a blessing that so many of these children were being killed in the fighting, and that the remainder should be dealt with similarly for the good of the world. ‘But whether you exterminate them or sterilise them, Nazism in all its horribleness will not perish from the earth until the last Nazi is dead.”
― Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

“Dangers and annoyances Like most of west Africa, Gorée is plagued by an assortment of insects whose sole purpose in life seems to be to drink as much of your blood as possible.”
― Anonymous