We stand in shit but let us not drown in it

We stand in shit but let us not drown in it is the phrase Lale Sokolov offers to the terrified young men packed into the cattle wagon carrying them toward Auschwitz in April 1942. The twenty-five-year-old, dressed in a pressed suit, clean white shirt, and tie, speaks these words of encouragement to men who try to engage him in conversation, trying to turn their fear into hope. The motto acknowledges the filth and horror of their situation without conceding that the filth must define them. It is an instruction to keep the head above the mire, to refuse the final surrender of drowning, and it becomes the quiet creed by which Lale navigates the next three years of his life.

Origin and Context

The phrase is born in the most degraded circumstances imaginable. Lale rattles across the countryside in a wagon less than ten feet wide, stuffed among countless young men in a train designed to transport livestock. He has not bathed or shaved since boarding two days earlier; his back and legs ache, his face itches, and he is feeling less and less himself. When the men around him mutter abusive remarks at his appearance and manner, accusing him of hailing from the upper class with the taunt "Now look where it's gotten you," he tries to shrug the words off and meet the glares with smiles. Privately he admits, Who am I trying to kid? I'm as scared as everyone else. The motto is therefore not a boast of courage but a strategy for managing shared terror, spoken by a man who is himself afraid, to men who are afraid, as a way of converting panic into a collective resolve to keep going.

The phrase also carries a deliberate echo of the animalization the prisoners are undergoing. The men are being transported like cattle, and later, in the dormitory, a hesitant "Mooooooo . . ." rises from deep in the block, drawing quiet but real laughter from the men and no interruption from the invisible officer. The joke is a small act of resistance, a way of owning the dehumanizing label rather than being crushed by it. The motto works the same way: it names the shit they stand in, refuses to pretend it is not there, and insists that standing in it is not the same as being it.

The Ethic of Survival

The motto becomes Lale's operating principle through the horrors that follow. When he is given the choice of participating in the destruction of his own people by working as the camp tattooist, he accepts, telling Gita, "I have been given the choice of participating in the destruction of our people, and I have chosen to do so in order to survive. I can only hope I am not one day judged a perpetrator or a collaborator." The phrase underwrites this decision: survival itself is the goal, and the moral compromise is the price of not drowning. The same logic governs his black-market smuggling operation, his trading with the SS, and his willingness to do "their dirty work" whether for the kapo or building blocks, as another prisoner acidly puts it. Lale's reply, "You have a way of putting things," concedes the charge without abandoning his course. The motto is his answer to the accusation that he is a Nazi puppet: he stands in the shit, but he will not drown in it.

Gita offers the counterpoint to this self-justification. When she calls him a hero, he demurs, and she insists, "You are a hero to me." She frames their shared choice to survive as "a type of resistance to these Nazi bastards," declaring that "Choosing to live is an act of defiance, a form of heroism." The motto and Gita's words are two faces of the same ethic: the refusal to die is itself a rebellion, and the dirty work of staying alive is not the same as collaboration. The phrase thus carries the book's central moral argument, that survival in the camps was not passive endurance but an active, defiant choice.

The Motto in Action After the War

The motto does not end with the camps. After the war, when Lale returns home to his sister Goldie and sets out to find Gita, the same refusal to drown drives him forward. In the town, he asks everyone he sees with a horse, bike, car, or truck if he can buy it from them, and they all refuse. As he is starting to despair, an old man comes toward him in a small cart drawn by a single horse. Lale steps in front of the animal, forcing the man to rein it in, and blurts out, "I'd like to buy your horse and cart." When he pulls up outside his sister's house and proudly shows off his new means of transport, Goldie exclaims that she hasn't got anything for the horse to eat. He points to the long grass: "Your front yard needs mowing." The resourcefulness, the refusal to accept defeat, the turning of an obstacle into an opportunity, all are the motto in action. Goldie's parting words, "Don't come back without Gita," are the emotional charge that carries him forward, and the horse and cart become the literal vehicle of his quest.

The Motto and the Telling of the Story

The phrase also frames the memoir itself. Lale lived his life by the motto "If you wake up in the morning, it is a good day," and it was only Gita's death and his need to join her that pushed him to tell his story, so that, in his words, "it would never happen again." The narrator describes how Lale shed "the burden of guilt he had carried for more than fifty years, the fear that he and Gita might be seen as Nazi collaborators." The motto is the answer to that fear: he stood in the shit of the camps, and he did not drown, and the telling of the story is the final proof that the choice to survive was worth making. The narrator reflects that Lale's memories "waltzed perfectly in step" with history, and that the story is "a unique lesson in humanity" rather than a lesson in history. The motto, with its crude honesty and its stubborn refusal to give up, is the human lesson at the heart of the book: acknowledge the shit, refuse to drown in it, and live to tell the tale.