Carolina Quotes
The statistics are meagre, and so we have no way of knowing the number of non-Jews who were murdered in the gas chambers prior to this cut-off date [i.e. 4 April 1943]; not many, compared to the Jews, but certainly they numbered in the tens of thousands. Yet to escape the crematoriums was, of course, to gain only the most feeble hold on the possibility of survival. Statistics regarding the non-Jews who perished during the four years of the existence of Auschwitz as a result of starvation and disease are likewise inexact but somewhat more reliable. It would appear that out of the four million who died, perhaps three quarters of a million - or approximately a fifth of the total - fell into the category which the Nazis termed Aryan. This was at Auschwitz alone.

William Styron Connected to the Carolinas

Source

Essay, 'Hell Reconsidered' [pub. New York Review of Books, June 29 1978] - p.112

work
This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982)
year
1978
locator
p.112

Cite this record

“The statistics are meagre, and so we have no way of knowing …” William Styron. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-6D2256AB35. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/6d2256ab35

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When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer. I left my position as manuscript reader at the McGraw-Hill Book Company with no regrets; the job had been onerous and boring. It did not occur to me that there would be many difficulties to impede my ambition; in fact, the job itself had been an impediment. All I knew was that I burned to write a novel and I could not have cared less that my bank account was close to zero, with no replenishment in sight. At the age of twenty-two I had such pure hopes in my ability to write not just a respectable first novel, but a novel that would be completely out of the ordinary, that when I left the McGraw-Hill Building for the last time I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
"Lie Down In Darkness", This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982)

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