Warsaw Quotes

Warsaw is burning. Warsaw is fighting its enemy in this last mortal battle. All the promises let us down, the help did not arrive. Lack of food and lack of potable water paralyzes and weakens. Yet we fight: with the enemy, with the fire and with the epidemics. Everyone is fighting. Whole city is tied in this mortal struggle. You send us letters of compliments and best wishes from London and Paris. We don't want wishes any more, nor do we await your help. It's too late for help. Before it arrives there will be only rubble here, a corpses-covered, leveled terrain. What we await is revenge. We expect that you will start fighting one day, just like Warsaw is… A day will come when Berlin will be set on flames, when German women and children will die just like ours are dying. I hope all of you will understand then that there is God's justice.

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

The stores are already empty, as they were looted immediately…This was the first stage. As soon as it ended the second stage began: the looting of apartments…At first they used to come on the pretext of “searching for arms”…As time passed, there was no longer a need for formal pretext; they simply come and take not only gold, silver, jewelry, and precious stones, but also pillows and blankets, and often linens, clothing, furs, and even furniture ...

Jewish children learn in secret. In backrooms and on long benches near a table. In time of danger they lean to hide their book between their stomach and their trousers---a kind of smuggling.

There is no doubt that Hitlerian Nazism will ultimately be defeated, for in the end the civilized nations will rise up to defend the liberty which the German barbarians seek to steal from mankind. However, I doubt that we will live through this carnage.

One of the most remarkable shindigs I ever attended was in Warsaw.

I had literary interests my whole life. I decided at the age of five I was going to be a writer. So I had done a great deal of reading. I suppose I was more at home in Greenwich Village than, say, any of classmates from Warsaw High School. But in any case, it was an overwhelming experience for me. It took me some time to begin to assimilate it.

I went to Poland for the Warsaw Film Festival, and it was quite an intense experience. I didn't think it would be, but it did feel quite emotional to go back to this place I'd heard so much about.