Then I too would lift my head because, for that short moment, I would know for certain that love and hope are infinitely more powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere beyond the line of my horizon there was life indestructible, always triumphant.
Despite spending time in the Auschwitz concentration camp and surviving in the face of violent, cruel antisemitism, Kovály details in this memoir her incredible ability to maintain a sense of hope and love in the face of incredible darkness and cruelty. In this quotation, Kovály references love and hope as the driving force that kept her alive and renewed her soul in even her darkest moments. In this way, this quotation is an incredible testament to Kovály spirit and mental strength. Though she was experiencing incredible, cruel, and violent prejudice, she was still able to see beyond the injustice of her life to find renewed strength in the hope and love that still existed somewhere in the world. She truly believed and realized that love and hope would—with guidance and humanity—overcome the hate, violence, and fury that she and millions of others were experiencing at the hands of the Nazi regime.
Human speech can only express what the mind can hold. You cannot describe hammer blows that crush your brain.
Kovály uses this quote when explaining her inability to describe her experiences at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Kovály is making the point that some experiences cannot be shared or described with words—either you live them, or you don’t. There are no words to describe the searing huger or biting cold or soul-moving pain of being beaten about the head with a hammer. Her time at Auschwitz is quite literally indescribably. Kovály believes that her mind simply cannot hold the words and descriptors necessary to share her experiences with others. She does not possess the words to help others understand.
I carry the past inside me folded up like an accordion, like a book of picture postcards that people bring home as souvenirs from foreign cities, small and neat.
In this quotation, Kovály speaks to her incredibly and life-saving ability to compartmentalize all that she has witnessed, felt, and experienced throughout the darkest moments of her life. She compares her past and these dark experiences to an accordion, which she keeps folded within her, only to be opened if and when she chooses to re-live those experiences. In this way, Kovály is comparing her life to different compartments. She is able to open and close her past at will and is able to choose if and when she explores those buried memories. Kovály is not defined by the darkness in her life; rather, she is control and has the power to choose when she opens the accordion and memories and with whom she shares those fragments of life.
