Quotes about Trauma

At the time of the liberation of the camps, I remember, we were convinced that after Auschwitz there would be no more wars, no more racism, no more hatred, no more anti-Semitism. We were wrong. This produced a feeling close to despair. For if Auschwitz could not cure mankind of racism, was there any chance of success ever? The fact is, the world has learned nothing. Otherwise, how is one to comprehend the atrocities committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia…

Men to the left! Women to the right! Eight words spokern quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother.

That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our only link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death.

One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.

Neighbors broke the news that my parents had been taken away by immigration officers, and just like that, my stable family life was over.

Trauma has a way of indelibly linking the incidentals to the profound.

An abusive relationship is worse than being in prison. I mean literally, not figuratively.

Suffering is traumatic and awful and we get angry and we shake our fists at the heavens and we vent and rage and weep. But in the process we discover a new tomorrow, one we never would have imagined otherwise.

If you don't feel safe as a child, you can't learn.

They put chains on me; they chained my waist, my legs. Put me in the back of a squad car, and I literally blacked out. I didn't even - there's whole pieces missing.

Surely she imagined things. But change in her life, her family's, especially around Christmas, meant pain, betrayal, trauma, and death.

The holiness of God is traumatic to unholy people.