“Just then there came the wheezy sound of an accordion. It was an odd little tune that, had he been alive exactly one hundred and fifty years later, the scarf-wearing pirate would have recognized as the first few bars from ‘Theme to Murder, She Wrote’.”

“In the end, of the one thousand fifty-six who had left, in a body, from the Tiburtina station, a total of fifteen came back alive. And of those dead, the luckiest were surely the first eight hundred and fifty. The gas chamber is the only seat of charity, in a concentration camp.”

“If the pirate with a scarf had been more poetically minded he’d have thought that her eyes were like a thousand emeralds, glittering in a far-off pirate treasure chest. But he wasn’t, so he just thought that she had really really green eyes, a bit like seaweed.”

“Dreyfus once wrote from Devil's Island that he would see the most glorious birds. Many years later in Brittany he realized they had only been seagulls... For me they will always be glorious birds.”

“All the first years, their only question had been -- asked with beseechings and tears that might have moved stone, in time, perhaps, but hearts are not stones: "Is he alive?" "Is she alive?”

“If she had been born a hundred years later, she would very likely have been encouraged to be angry, told she had a right to express her anger and her sorrow and her bewilderment and her rage, and generally to disintegrate. These were not the expectations of her friends and family. Nothing could have been further from her expectations of herself. Instead, she threw herself into serving others.”