How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
'And the music was always stopping in the middle,' he said, 'and then there was an announcement. All day long, music and announcements.'
'Very modern,' I said.
He closed his eyes, remembered gropingly. 'There was one announcement that was always crooned, like a nursery rhyme. Many times a day it came. It was the call for the Sonderkommando.'
'Oh?' I said.
'Leichentriiger zu Wache,' he crooned, his eyes still closed.
Translation: 'Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse.' In an institution in which the purpose was to kill human beings by the millions, it was an understandably common cry. (2.17-22)
Sick. The ideological mindset that makes total war permissible is also the foundation for developing an entire institution designed to systematically kill millions of people. On top of that, the Nazis are trying to normalize the whole thing by setting horror to crooning music and sing-song orders. Nasty.
Quote #2
'How would they dare?' he said. 'I was such a pure and terrifying Aryan that they even put me in a special detachment. Its mission was to find out how the Jews always knew what the S.S. was going to do next. There was a leak somewhere, and we were out to stop it.' He looked bitter and affronted, remembering it, even though he had been that leak.
'Was the detachment successful in its mission?' I said.
'I'm happy to say,' said Arpad, 'that fourteen S.S. men were shot on our recommendation. Adolf Eichmann himself congratulated us.'
'You met him, did you?' I said.
'Yes' said Arpad, 'and I'm sorry I didn't know at the time how important he was.'
'Why?' I said.
'I would have killed him,' said Arpad. (3.21-27)
Arpad's experience of WWII is unique. Like Campbell, he's a pretend Nazi. Unlike Campbell, he's a combat officer. Here', we're getting a peek at how Arpad would use his authority to kill other Nazis: he would say that they were being too friendly to Jews. Arpad is the actual mole the higher-ups are looking for, but he maneuvers things to protect himself and take out some S.S. men in the process.
Quote #3
He never told me what the book meant to him, and I never asked him. All he ever said to me about it was that it wasn't for children, that I wasn't to look at it.
So, of course, I looked at it every time I was left alone. There were pictures of men hung on barbed wire, mutilated women, bodies stacked like cord-wood—all the usual furniture of world wars. (7.4-5)
Campbell's first exposure to war is this text from his childhood. We have two takeaways from this snippet. This first is the harsh description of the ravages of war as "furniture." It's jarring, but it feels sadly true. The cruelty shouldn't be commonplace, but in war it is. The second is that Campbell sees this as a child, after his father says that it isn't for children. Why is this noteworthy? Because it reminds us that war and its traumas happen to children, too—even though it's not for them.