"We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses.... We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the “Muslims,” the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception."
- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
“In the Holocaust, I discovered the human condition, the terminus of a great adventure at which Europeans arrived after two thousand years of culture and morality.”
- Imre Kertész
and of course, the oft-forgotten final image...
[quotes via Genocide and the Fine Arts, Adam Thirlwell's review of Claude Lanzmann's The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir]