Torture has an indelible character. Whoever was tortured, stays tortured.

Jean Améry (born Hans Mayer), an Austrian-born Jewish intellectual and Resistance member, wrote this line in the aftermath of his arrest and torture by the Gestapo and his subsequent deportation to Nazi concentration camps (including Auschwitz). After the war he became one of the most incisive essayists on the moral and psychological aftereffects of Nazi persecution. The formulation belongs to his reflections on torture as a defining experience that permanently alters a person’s relation to the world, the body, and trust in others—an argument he developed most famously in his essay on torture within his postwar collection on “overcoming” (or failing to overcome) the past.

Améry insists that torture is not merely an episode that ends when the physical pain stops; it is a lasting transformation of the self. “Indelible character” points to a permanent mark on identity and memory: the tortured person remains, in a sense, fixed in that violated state. The second sentence underscores the existential dimension—torture destroys basic trust in the world and in one’s own bodily integrity, so the survivor carries an enduring knowledge of human cruelty and vulnerability. The aphoristic phrasing also functions as a moral claim: societies that treat torture as a means to an end misunderstand its irreversible, life-long consequences.