Quotation of the Day

This quotation comes from Elfriede and Johannes H. Warkentin, "Editha" in Nelly Das, ed., trans. Nancy Bernhardt Holland, Gone Without a Trace: German-Russian Women in Exile (Lincoln, NE: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 2001), p. 104. It is in reference to the Russian-German women who perished in the labor army during World War II.

But what about the thousands of women who died there, the martyrs, our mothers? They lie in mass graves - nameless, interred without a burial mound, without even a wooden cross as a marker to their memories. Were they ever really alive?

Again, I do not have anything to add to this quotation right now. I think it stands well on its own. I also think that this total obliteration of even memory is one of the things that makes Stalin orders of magnitude more evil than Hitler.