Prisoner of Night and Fog

If you think love means secrecy, then you don’t understand what love is at all.

Loving someone is one thing, and being loved is another, but being loved by the one you love - that's paradise. And I don't think I shall ever have it. Some men aren't capable of loving you back.

You and I are impossible." she said. "No." Gently, he brushed the hair back from her face. "We are what's real and true.

Do you always worry about everyone else before yourself?" "I don't know. I suppose." "It's a miserable habit...

He reached out with his good hand, cupping her chin. "Gretchen, don't you realise by now I would give up everything to be with you?

She stood on the edge of night, that sliver of gray between darkness and dawn, that razor-thin line separating the first part of her life and whatever lay ahead.

The man she had loved as a father was a fraud. He kissed the back of her hands and advocated war; he had played with her on the carpet with toy soldiers, and all along he had been planning the extinction of an entire people. There would be no resettlement in the east. No carefully orchestrated exodus of Jews from Germany, no trains wending through the mountains, carrying Jews to another home in another country. There would be no peaceful expulsion. It was obvious now; Hitler had said it himself tonight. The internal purification of the Jewish spirit is not possible. She understood. In Hitler's Germany, the Jews would have no place at all.

Then he cradled her face, touching her so tenderly she could scarcely breathe, and brought his face to hers until their lips met in a kiss that burned her mouth.

No, not anonymous. Maybe she didn't matter enough to the Brauns, certainly not enough to her mother and Uncle Dolf, and definitely not at all to Reinhard. But she mattered to herself. And that was all that needed to be true. She would figure something out

His proximity should disgust her, but it only confused her.