Gordon Richiusa, Ode to Life!: The True Story of Holocaust Survivors Eddy and Eveline Hoffman (Five Birds, 2020)

We both lived under more than one form of government including communism, fascism, a monarchy, a dictatorship and we both wish people in this country would learn what can happen under a dictatorship to take away our simple freedoms.
The question we are most often asked, in person or in the hundreds of letters that we have received, is, “Do you hate the Germans?”
The answer we give is this, “No, we don’t hate the Germans.” We probably will never be able to totally forgive those who mistreated us and other Jews, those Germans for what they did, and we’ll never be able to say that we are not still feeling the affects, but those feelings hurt us more than anyone. There’s a saying: “Hatred corrodes the container it’s held in.” If you keep hate in you, it eats you up. Telling our story has been eye opening for all of us.–Eveline and Eddy Hoffman