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"For in this place the lame, the blind and the weak would look in vain for mercy or pity. The Ten Commandments, those principles of human conduct, did not prevail here: Auschwitz had its own laws and macabre values. At Auschwitz gold teeth might buy a bowl of turnip soup; at Auschwitz a camp orchestra would play cheerful military music, not only in the morning when prisoners marched out to work, but also at night when, bruised and battered, they stuggled back carrying their dead comrades.

"At Auschwitz Kapos* were given rewards and privileges for reducing the number of men in their working party - how they did this was their own affair. At Auschwitz, in Block 10, women were sterilized while in another block men were castrated. Auschwitz was a place where every European language was spoken; it was also a place where people died, not only from starvation, sickness and epidemics, but from being battered to death, killed by having phenol injected into their heart, or driven into the gas chamber.

"This wretched piece of land in eastern Europe was under the sway of the SS whose members regarded themselves as the elite of the German nation, a nation which had given to the world not only great writers and composers, but also men like Adolf Hitler. The little town of Oswieczim, which the Nazis called Auschwitz, had been turned into an inferno, and anyone taken there by an unkind fate might regard himself truly forsaken by God and his fellow men."
Eyewitness Auschwitz - Three Years in the Gas Chambers by Filip Müller

*Prisoner of a concentration camp in charge of a working party