How we cite our quotes: Chapter.Paragraph
Quote #1
"You may not get another…another…chance. Not before she…" She couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence, as if death were too final a punctuation. (2.47)
As the story begins, Becca and her sisters are coming to terms with Gemma's looming death. It's so difficult and emotional that Becca can't even bring herself to say the word.
Quote #2
"It was not even a concentration camp. It was simply a place of…extermination." "Then my grandmother was there?" "That is not possible, my dear," Harvey said, his voice suddenly very old. "No woman ever escaped Kulmhof alive." (14.86-14.88)
During her journey to uncover Gemma's story, Becca has to come to terms with not only her heritage, but the genocide of her people during the Holocaust.
Quote #3
Her dreams were filled with images of the camps, gleaned from many horror movies: the scarecrow men, their ribs protruding like hideous maps; the piles of bodies in the mass graves all grown together as if in a garden of death; children with eyes like devalued coins, caught behind the wire barbs." (16.26)
Like for many people, Becca's knowledge about the Holocaust is centered on concentration camps, and those sound bad enough. She's horrified to learn about extermination camps like the one that her grandmother survived.
Quote #4
"Once it was believed birch trees housed souls of the dead. Even today, at Pentecost…people cut down branches of the birch and bring it into the house to put around the windows." (20.103)
Birch trees are symbolic of the dead in Poland. They also figured prominently in Gemma's version of Briar Rose, where "white birch trees gleamed like the souls of the new dead." (21.1) Some fairy tale, huh?
Quote #5
"Five thousand corpses?" Josef murmured, still not believing. By the first week's end he could name a good many of them. (26.6)
Josef was imprisoned in a labor camp, as opposed to a concentration camp or an extermination camp. But that didn't mean there wasn't death all around him.
Quote #6
The outcome of the raid was never in doubt. They all expected to die, though not a one of them said it out loud.…Josef alone said it. "We are all going to die." They shunned him then. (27.27-27.29)
The first group of partisans that Josef falls in with after he escapes the camp went on a suicide mission. Why do you think they sacrificed themselves? And why were they unwilling to talk about it?
Quote #7
"Between eighty and one hundred dead each time means they have killed over eighteen hundred to almost two thousand men and women and children today alone. It is worse than Sachenhausen." (29.54)
The extermination camp that Gemma survived killed thousands of people a day. As the only woman that escaped, she beat some serious odds.
Quote #8
They came to the side of the pit in the deepening dark. It was enormous, full of shadows: shadows of arms, of legs, of heads thrown back, mouths open in silenced screams. (29.61)
No getting around it: this is a horrifying image. Remember that Gemma was found among these corpses. No wonder she went ahead and repressed that incident.
Quote #9
She screamed out Aron's name and tried to scramble up to him, but Josef grabbed on to her and held her down, partially to keep her from her death but also because at the moment all thoughts escaped him and he was simply too terrified to let go. (30.44)
Gemma's husband died almost immediately after they were married. Presumably, she had lost her family prior to that. And then there were all those corpses in the pile where they found her. That's a lot of death for one woman to deal with.
Quote #10
She had stayed in there longer than necessary…trying to understand that Gemma—her Gemma—had died and been resurrected by a kiss of life given by a man who had probably never kissed a woman before—or since. (32.2)
Gemma literally died at the extermination camp, until Josef's CPR brought her back. Part of her metaphorically died too, if you think about it, since she couldn't remember her identity after that.