“The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life.”

—  Hannah Arendt , book The Origins of Totalitarianism

Part 3, Ch. 12, § 3.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Context: The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

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Hannah Arendt 85
Jewish-American political theorist 1906–1975

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