Another thing was to see when you went to work, when you went to slave labor, who was no longer there. Who's left. And it became like an animal. Oh, I'm living another day, or he's no longer. And you know the worst part, that you couldn't cry for it. You couldn't cry in Auschwitz. You cried, you died. If you showed even more weakness than you already had, you didn't survive the day.
     - Michael Vogel

At Auschwitz, they would have selections--inspections. They would make us take off all of our clothes and stand in line. We would always try to get in the back of the line so that we could see what they were picking today. Fat... thin... If they wanted thin, we would walk with our stomachs pushed out; if they wanted fat, we would hold them in. We used to prick our fingers, with anything-- even a rusty nail. Then we would use our blood like rouge on our cheeks. We wanted to look healthy. We wanted to pass the selection... we wanted to live. Even if it meant another day in the camp, we wanted to live.
     - Shari Rauchmann Smajovits

Most of us who ended up in work camps should have been in college studying... we were not from a working class. We worked hard in the forced labor camps. At first, we could receive letters from our families. They even sent parcels of food. To take our minds off the hard work, we would talk about the end of the war. Certainly it would not go on for long.
     - Frank Dukes-Dobos

During snowstorms there were seemingly endless roll calls day and night. We had to stand there for three, sometimes four, even six hours.
     - Louis Martin-Chauffier

The work was often senseless. It consisted of lugging heavy stones from one end of the quarry to the other and from the button to the top and then back again-always in double time.
     - Octave Rabaté