author also describes the lives and deaths of people who feature in the book with great pathos, commemorating the dead by the effect their loss has on the living. She stresses how common it is to lose an entire family, one member after the other:

Just after having lost her husband, Aunt Anna saw her nineteen-year-old son taken away. The men were lined up, and every tenth one was shot.

Logos appears in the way that normal life is contrasted with the way the Nazi regime continually disrupts and distorts it. The ordinary heartaches of Abek's unrequited love for Gerda are turned into a matter of life and death when she refuses his family's attempts to secure her release from Sosnowitz and when he transfers to the worst camp in Germany in order to be closer to her. There is also logos in the way that Gerda continually has to weigh whether life is worth living under the circumstances, despite her appreciation of the world and its beauty.

Some specific quotations from All But My Life in which Gerda Weissmann Klein commemorates the dead and shows readers why the Holocaust is an unrepeatable atrocity are as follows.

The train began to creep away. Papa’s eyes were fixed upon us. He did not move. He did not wave. He did not call farewell. Unseen hands were moving him farther and farther away from us. We watched until the train was out of sight. I never saw my father again.

The author often has no idea what happened to people after she parted from them, and this includes her parents. She commemorates the dead, as here, by fixing a picture in her mind and the reader's of the last time she saw them.

I paused at the graves of my beloved friends who were never privileged to know the joy of freedom, the security of a loaf of bread, or the supreme happiness of holding a child in their arms. I listened to the gentle wind in the trees, to the screech of a bird, and I looked at the flickering memorial candles on the headstones of their graves.

Sometimes, however, Weissmann Klein has been able to visit the graves of her friends. When she does so, she thinks of the tragic nature of their deaths, and all the experiences they will never be able to enjoy.

Why? Why did we walk like meek sheep to the slaughter-house? Why did we not fight back? What had we to lose? Nothing but our lives. Why did we not run away and hide? We might have had a chance to survive. Why did we walk deliberately and obediently into their clutches? I know why. Because we had faith in humanity. Because we did not really think that human beings were capable of committing such crimes.

Any Holocaust memoir has to ask why this atrocity was allowed to happen. This is part of convincing the reader to do whatever they can to ensure that it never happens again. Passages such as this function as a warning that too much faith in humanity can be dangerous. Given the right circumstances, human beings can do unspeakable things, and other human beings have no choice but to endure them.

Ilse, a childhood friend of mine, once found a raspberry in the concentration camp and carried it in her pocket all day to present to me that night on a leaf. Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry and you give it to your friend.

The tragedy of the Holocaust is emphasized in details such as this one, which show the dignity and generosity of those who were forced to endure such suffering.