20 Quotes by Wendy Hoffman

Betrayal is a more subtle, twisted feeling than terror. It burns and eats, but terror stabs right through.

I want to see her naked, " Mengele said pointing to Marlene. She cried and shock. My mother flung her body in front of Marlene's and said, "You can't have her. I love her, my daughter." My father said, "Take the younger one. She's smarter, " as he pushed me over forward.Marlene cried because father said I was smarter even though he was just trying to manipulate Mengele. The doctor's chest grew large.

I imagine everyone wears layered masks, and parades around a variety or panoply of false selves depending on the occasion. Normal people do that out of their own insecurities and ambitions. Mind-controlled people are hollow because their minds were taken away from them. Their controllers instruct these shells of people about what to do and when. Theirs is institutionalized, manufactured falsity.

This book is not for the delicate or for people who are convinced the world is fine just the way it is.

I am hyper alert to people turning away from me. I have a perennial sense of being an outsider.

The concentration camps were a laboratory for the Nazis. They put the minorities and intellectuals in there because the general population wouldn't mind losing those people. The Nazi leaders knew people needed targets for their own self-hatred.

To psychotherapists, I say, don't just leave us abandoned because you think you don't know enough to help us, or because the world doesn't believe in what we went through, or because our trauma is too awful to hear about.

Had I not been dissociative, I never would have survived.

I wanted my mother to love me. Despite all the torture and brutality.