Youp

“Why are they doing this, Pa?” Kim asks. “Because they are destroyers of things.”
― Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

“They were trying to escape. They asked us "Where's the railway?" We'd never seen a railway. They asked "Where's Moscow? Leningrad?" They were asking the wrong people: we'd never heard of those places. We're Ostyaks. People were running away starving. They were given a handful of flour. They mixed it with water and drank it and then they immediately got diarrhea. The things we saw! People were dying everywhere; they were killing each other.... On the island there was a guard named Kostia Venikov, a young fellow. He was courting a pretty girl who had been sent there. He protected her. One day he had to be away for a while, and he told one of his comrades, "Take care of her," but with all the people there the comrade couldn't do much.... People caught the girl, tied her to a poplar tree, cut off her breasts, her muscles, everything they could eat, everything, everything.... They were hungry, they had to eat. When Kostia came back, she was still alive. He tried to save her, but she had lost too much blood.”
― Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag

“Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

So, let us be alert-alert in a twofold sense:

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.

And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”
― Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Keav tells me the soldiers claim to love Cambodia and its people very much. I wonder then why they are this mean if they love us so much”
― Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers