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“If you had a secret - one that could destroy your life if shared, what would you do to protect it?”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Nurse Behind the Gates

“There was nothing conservative about Adolf Hitler. Hitler was an artist and a revolutionary at heart. He wanted to completely upend and remake German society.”
― A.E. Samaan

“In the knowing, there was peace.”
― Jennifer A. Nielsen, Resistance

“There’s no clearer definition of war than the sight of barbed wired fences surrounding dark fields muddied by the sky’s tears.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Nurse Behind the Gates

“Whenever you feel like the world is against you, start counting your breaths. One breath every five seconds will show anyone who is watching that you haven’t a worry in the world.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Nurse Behind the Gates

“The empty seats belong to the other Jewish kids who were in my class. I’m the only one left.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Nurse Behind the Gates

“You’re right to fight for everything you believe in, and I’ll do “the same, but only until it is too dangerous. I won’t risk our lives for a fight we won’t win.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Nurse Behind the Gates

“Yesterday a sand snake crawled by just outside my tent door, and for the first time in my life I looked upon a snake not with a creeping phobia but with a sudden and surprising feeling of compassion. Somehow I pitied him, because he was a snake instead of a man. And I don't know why I felt that way, for I feel pity for all men too, because they are men.

It may be that the war has changed me, along with the rest. It is hard for anyone to analyze himself. I know that I find more and more that I wish to be alone, and yet contradictorily I believe I have a new patience with humanity that I've never had before. When you've lived with the unnatural mass cruelty that mankind is capable of inflicting upon itself, you find yourself dispossessed of the faculty for blaming one poor man for the triviality of his faults. I don't see how any survivor of war can ever be cruel to anything, ever again.”
― Ernie Pyle, Here is Your War

“When I opened the box, I had to remove myself from whose handwriting it was that I was reading and whose story I was hearing. I had to, or I never would have made it past the first letter. If I stopped to think about my Grandpa writing to my Grandma, knowing how much he loved her and how many years he spent without her after her death, I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it through just one letter without an onslaught of tears. And it was Grandpa, a voice I knew so well. One that I miss terribly.”
― Kara Martinelli, My Very Dearest Anna

“...the experience of battle forever divides those who talk of nothing else but its prospect from those who talk of everything else but its memory.”
― James D. Hornfischer

“War is unlike life. It's a denial of everything you learn life is. And that's why when you get finished with it, you see that if offers no lessons that can't be bettered learned in civilian life. You are exposed to horrors you would sooner forget.”
― Robert Graff

“You don't need to roam the streets in that outfit again," Stanislaw assured him. "One of us will bring something down.”
― Sarah Brazytis, Treasures of Darkness

“[Someone in the POW camp] said, ‘Look down there at the main gate!��, and the American flag was flying! We went berserk, we just went berserk! We were looking at the goon tower and there’s no goons there, there are Americans up there! And we saw the American flag, I mean—to this day I start to well up when I see the flag." -Sam Lisica, former prisoner of war, WWII ~ The Things Our Fathers Saw, Vol. III”
― Matthew A. Rozell, The Things Our Fathers Saw - Vol. 3, The War In The Air Book Two: The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation from Hometown, USA

“Hitler was invading every European country surrounding Germany, and it was obvious that eventually we would also be at war. At the time, some Americans joined the German American Bund that backed what Hitler was doing. Others advocated that we stay out of the war.... Charles Lindbergh was of that persuasion and supported the isolationist “America First Movement,�� advocating that the United States remain neutral. You could not blame people for their hostile feelings towards the German-Americans, when Nazi Bund meetings were being held at many locations around New York City, as well as in the neighboring Schuetzenpark, the German word for the riflemen’s or shooters�� park, in North Bergen.
In April of 1941, after President Roosevelt accused Lindbergh of being a fascist sympathizer, Lindbergh resigned his commission as a colonel in the United States Army Air Forces. Later in the war, Lindbergh flew 50 combat missions in the Pacific Theater as a civilian consultant, but Roosevelt refused to reinstate his commission. The majority of Americans just wanted to stay out of what they considered a European matter.”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater One"

“Antanas eased up on the accelerator and pulled the truck onto the shoulder. The sound of the soldiers' footsteps crunching in the snow made Maria sit up straight. The truck had driven about thirty metres past the patrol, but none of the soldiers had fired upon them. Antanas hoped fervently that the transport documents that Peter had furnished him would pass inspection. Maria reached down and touched a metal pipe concealed beneath her seat. She was prepared to use it.

Jadwyga continued to pray quietly. "Mother Mary, spare me, Maria, and the other women from rape, and Antanas from death."

As a sergeant approached the truck, Jadwyga's stomach cramped, sweat broke out on her forehead, and her arms began to shake. Then she fainted. Maria propped Jadwyga up to make it look as though she was sleeping, and then smiled at the sergeant who was rapping on the glass.

Antanas rolled down his window.”
― Mark Creedon, Caught Between Two Devils

“The true basis for the Nuremberg Trial, the one which no one has ever dared to point out, is, I suspect, not fear: it is the spectacle of the ruins, it is the panic of the victors. It is necessary that the others be in the wrong. It is necessary, for if, by chance, they had not been monsters, how would the victors bear the weight of all those destroyed cities, and those thousands of phosphorus bombs? It is the horror, it is the despair of the victors which is the true motive for the trial. They have veiled their faces before what they were forced to do and, to give themselves courage, they transformed their massacres into a crusade. They invented a posteriori a right to massacre in the name of respect for humanity. Being killers, they promoted themselves to policemen.”
― Maurice Bardèche, Nuremberg or the Promised Land

“I never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency.

I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.

I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that "the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda." Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“GI’s were returning to the United States and many others were being shipped to the Pacific to finish what looked to be a difficult battle ahead. The Japanese soldiers were a formidable foe, many of whom were willing to die for their country. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and three days later dropped one on Nagasaki. The Imperial Japanese Navy was now unable to continue conducting operations and their army would no longer be able to withstand an Allied invasion of the Japanese islands. Less than a week later, on September 2, 1945, Japanese Foreign Affairs Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the Japanese Instrument of an unconditional Surrender on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo harbor. In the United States, everyone celebrated VJ Day, Victory over Japan Day, and the end of the war.”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater One"

“I do not worry about dying �� when you get to my age you never think about it, you just carry on with life and enjoy it.'
Vernon Jones - Ox & Bucks Light Infantry - D-Day Veteran”
― Robert D. Anderson

“I look again at the photo of my grandfather, framed by maps three times his size. Given his experiences before and during the war, the answers were obvious: central planning, a clean slate. education, cars and car parks, more train lines and bigger roads. Such improvements would bring shared prosperity and decent provision for the sick and the old. And it could all be paid for from the profits of the factories. The war, for all its horrors, had shown what government and industry, working in partnership, were able to achieve.”
― Bart van Es, The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found

“I look again at the photo of my grandfather, framed by maps three times his size. Given his experiences before and during the war, the answers were obvious: central planning, a clean slate, education, cars and car parks, more train lines and bigger roads. Such improvements would bring shared prosperity and decent provision for the sick and the old. And it could all be paid for from the profits of the factories. The war, for all its horrors, had shown what government and industry, working in partnership, were able to achieve.”
― Bart van Es, The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found

“I was surprised to find myself not afraid of dying as much as I was afraid of how I would die. Afraid I’d look afraid when the firing began to cut us down…The possibility of death is a strange fear - fear of the scope of your ability- exciting, like the fear of your inability to appear worldly in the eyes of the first girl, you fumbled through the manipulations of seduction.”
― James William Lauder, Hard Tears Soft Laughter

“La liberación de París en 1944 significó la liberación de la humanidad entera”
― Abu Faisal Sergio Tapia, LA LIBERACIÓN DE PARÍS 1944: LA VICTORIA DE LA RESISTENCIA FRANCESA

“My own recommendation, then as always, was that no operations should be undertaken in the Mediterranean except as a directly supporting move for the Channel attack and that our planned redeployment to England should proceed with all possible speed. Obviously a sufficient strength had to be kept in the Mediterranean to hold what we had already gained and to force the Nazis to maintain sizable forces in that area.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“That evening [April 13, 1945] Dad [General Eisenhower], General Bradley, General Hodges, a group of aides, and I sat around talking. Dad had just sent his message of condolences to President Roosevelt's widow. But the thing most on his mind was the horror camp near Gotha that he had gone through only the day before. The scene of the atrocities had left him visibly shaken and he had not yet adjusted the entire episode in his mind. With him on the visit was the reputedly rough-and-tough George Patton, who had become physically ill. Dad had cabled home to ask for a contingent of reporters and legislators to come immediately to witness.”
― John Eisenhower

“Though good men may pass without the world’s recognition, they can live on in the hearts of young people who know the truth.”
― Gregory A. Freeman

“Il ne connaissait que le combat brutal, au paroxysme de la violence. Sa conception répondait beaucoup plus à celle des masses qui venaient se faire tuer devant nos lignes qu’�� celle d’un escrimeur élégant qui sait rompre pour pouvoir mieux porter le coup décisif. A l’art de la guerre il substituait finalement la force brutale, dont l’efficacité était garantie par la puissance de la volonté qui l’employait.”
― Erich von Manstein, Erich Von Manstein. Mémoires (Tempus)

“Si Hitler s’en tint de plus en plus au principe de la défense à tout prix ce fut parce que cette méthode répondait à sa nature profonde. Il ne connaissait que le combat brutal, au paroxysme de la violence. Sa conception répondait beaucoup plus à celle des masses qui venaient se faire tuer devant nos lignes qu’�� celle d’un escrimeur élégant qui sait rompre pour pouvoir mieux porter le coup décisif. A l’art de la guerre il substituait finalement la force brutale, dont l’efficacité était garantie par la puissance de la volonté qui l’employait.”
― Erich von Manstein, Erich Von Manstein. Mémoires (Tempus)

“Beauty reveals us.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Our Narrow Hiding Places

“The men and women in the streets were shells of themselves now; on the outside, this was true. But it was like the lights inside of them had been relit.”
― Kristopher Jansma, Our Narrow Hiding Places