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“Her soul died that night under a radiant silver moon in the spring of 1918 on the side of a blood-spattered trench. Around her lay the mangled dead and the dying. Her body was untouched, her heart beat calmly, the blood coursed as ever through her veins. But looking deep into those emotionless eyes one wondered if they had suffered much before the soul had left them. Her face held an expression of resignation, as though she had ceased to hope that the end might come.”
― Helen Zenna Smith, Not So Quiet...

“Many Germans nowadays say they were not Nazi, and many were not, but they were nearly ALL Party members. It was safer ... and if you were not, you could end up in a ‘campâ€� for retraining ... so they mostly all paid ‘lip serviceâ€� to the Nazi Party.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“Differences disappear when faced with death.”
― Shannon A. Thompson, 2013: A Stellar Collection

“Children accept the conditions they are born into, and, to a degree, I was getting used to the bombings, fires, and death around me. I remember that I thought those things were normal. It is grown-ups who worry about things, and this ... this was total panic! I could taste the fear, and I could see that my mother was frightened, which I had never seen before, and this made me even more frightened.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“A very important man used to visit her sometimes, and I met him too. He loved children and used to dandle me on his knee. This was how the title came about for this book, Uncle Hitler, although in the old German tradition, I called him Uncle Adolf, even though I was not related to him. This was a sign of respect to an older person, which is why I called Frau Eva ‘Aunty Evaâ€�.”
― Alfred Nestor

“I remember seeing one elderly man look at us, and he held his hand out, and most frightening were his eyes, dark as a soulless abyss, so black that it looked as if it had been blasted from a cyclone. I felt he was looking right at me. For a moment, I thought I was looking through his sockets, past his brain and behind him; as the tears started rolling down my cheeks a godless universe was expanding within me. Then I became hysterical.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“I look at my mother, connected by a breath of glimmering hope, her red and shadowed eyes reveal that some element of our whole being has been lost and, somehow, thrown away. Sob-gasp, sob-gasp, sob-gasp. Slowly, that feeling within me fades. But wisps of it stay with you, locked in the chambers of your mind, always.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“The fact is that many people did not â€� and still do not â€� understand that many Germans were held in the concentration camps from 1933 onwards. The camps were not just for Jews or other ‘non-peopleâ€�, but also for any German who had made some remark about the Nazis, or who would not follow the Nazi rules.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“They say in death our war is over. I don't believe that.”
― Paul Allor, Tet

“I heard people talking about what this Red Army did to any Germans they captured, and this only added to my fears.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“We had the air war overhead, which was frightening, but we were, in a way, getting used to it. Now, however, we could hear â€� and at night, see â€� the flashes of explosions reflected in the dark sky. We could feel the ground vibrate under our feet. The war was getting closer!”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“The train, I was later told by my mother, only had about ten carriages to it, and there were hundreds of people fighting to get on. I don’t think anybody knew where the train was going, only that it was leaving Strausberg and would take us away from the Russians, who were now arriving on the far end of the platform. Some German SS soldiers and Police were shooting at the Russian troops, and many people â€� men, women and children â€� were hit by the flying bullets.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“Inside my carriage there was mass panic and I was in danger of being trampled, but somebody picked me off the floor, and I found myself by the window on the platform side. I was very frightened now, for I thought that I had lost my mother and was all alone, but a few minutes later she arrived at my side. She had some blood on her face, but she told me not to worry, it would all be fine soon.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“Within minutes we had left the station and were entering a cutting with trees on both sides, so the horror of the massacre was now out of sight. The train left the wooded cutting, and we saw Strausberg on fire. There were Russian tanks in the streets and soldiers on foot entering buildings. People were being dragged out, and shot.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“I thought of the people on the roof and wondered how they managed to stay up there as there was nothing to hang on to but, thinking back, I think they had either been shot or had fallen off the train many miles back as we left Strausberg.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“At times the engine stopped, and grown-ups and children climbed out of the carriages with tins to collect water from the engine steam pipes. This was the only drinking water that we had access to, and though it was hot and very rusty, it was the best drink I felt I’d ever had.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“We had seen too many horrors already, and we could see and hear more explosions all around us as the war continued, very close to our hiding place; machine gun fire and the sounds of grenades â€� all very frightening.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“But you never knew where the bombs would fall in the dark, so night bombing was even more frightening than daylight bombing. Let’s just say, it scared the living daylights out of us!”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“With our collective shock, what we saw seemed to be frozen into a state of suspended animation. Indelibly etched into our memories in terror, forever! My life was in slow motion, it was as if I was no longer in my body and this was a rather bad dream! It is almost impossible to describe with words what I saw, but I will try. This very experience is the one that has continued to shake me awake during the dense night of my lifetime.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“I felt so much more than horror. I was so afraid, shocked by what I saw. There were hundreds of men, women and children hanging from the trees ... there was blood everywhere! We all saw that every person had been gutted, like a fish. My instinct was to run, but where to ... I was on a train. As I watched those around me on the train, so many others also looked like they had explosions in their eyes and they too wanted to flee.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“As we passed this living cruelty, I shuddered in momentarily isolation and then let out an audible gasp at what I saw. They were hanging from trees! Some shaking violently, with their intestines hanging out of their bodies! Those who were still partly alive were screaming with pain, and wriggling on the branches trying to get off the ropes ... some had fallen off the branches of the trees, they were crawling along the ground, and towards us.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“As he journeyed alone toward the monster that is death, we could do nothing to help him, nor the others still alive; all the words of strength on our lips melted away, our love not great enough to bind them to life, and our hope not enough to will them to live.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“Current interventions in use with children include psycho-pharmacological treatments, play therapy, psychological debriefing and testimony therapy, but this was Nazi Germany in 1945!”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“In therapy, to meet the needs of traumatized survivors of war and torture, the patient is requested to repeatedly talk about the worst traumatic event in detail while re-experiencing all emotions associated with the event. Traumatic memory, they say, is cleared by narration of whole life; from early childhood up to the present date ... this book is my therapy. I am awash with living memories.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“Later, I started to understand just why these children ‘hatedâ€� us other children. I understood that they did not, in fact, hate ‘usâ€�, but hated the fact that we were German and spoke in a language that they associated with pain, fear and the loss of their parents, uncles, grandfathers and grandmothers, their whole families, in fact. Once I understood this it affected me in all sorts of subconscious ways, ways that were to blight my life for many years and make me deny my German birth.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“I never liked telling war stories. Some men love to tell them. Hell, some men need to. They need to convince themselves that the war is over. But I'm not one of them.”
― Paul Allor, Tet

“I was appraising . . . not eye fooking.”
― Paul Allor, Tet

“There's no way you can convince a conventional military thinker that the price of success in guerilla war is pig shit. They'll accept casualties, privation, hunger, death, destruction, murder and the CIA. But they won't accept unshined belt buckles and they damn sure won't accept pig shit.”
― Jim Morris

“And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there will still be plain old death.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five [Signed Full Leather Collector's Edition in original shrinkwrap]

“I just call a volunteer standing two steps next to me who holds
his head out for too long after the shot. At that moment, his head jolts, the
familiar and terrible dull sound of the bullet’s impact sounds, and the man
slowly collapses. The bullet penetrated the forehead and tore off half the
skullcap behind. Still mid-fall, he claws his hands into the wound and smears
himself over and over with his own brain. It was a terrible sight.”
― Philipp Cross, The Other Trench: The WW1 Diary and Photos of a German Officer