"So you are not forgotten forever," he says, adding, "So that when we survive to tell our story, and our sons and grandsons do the same, your memory will live on within us".
And even when we survive adolescence with our bodies intact, our minds are left battered by the psychological war that's been waged against us.
At the end of the day, the body is the bottom line, when we survive to advanced old age.
On most days, our guides helped us find places to eat lunch although there were days when we survived on nutrition bars brought from home.
He chose Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with its concluding chorus based on Schiller's "Ode to Joy," he said, "because it represents the idea of Mauthausen, the vision we had that when we survived, it would be in a world of freedom".
The most euphoric day I've known in football was had in Torquay, when we survived relegation on the final day.
As Sherriff put it in the debate: "A tax system that lets someone dine on crocodile steak on their private jet without paying a penny, when we cannot survive a period without the Treasury taxing us for it, cannot be a fair one".
Our current solo status on Earth is therefore an evolutionary oddity – though it is not clear when our species became Earth's only masters, nor is it clear why we survived when all other versions of humanity died out.
Nonetheless, when we have survived a political crisis (the Watergate crisis, in which President Richard Nixon obeyed a court order to hand over the tapes, the Bush v. Gore crisis, in which someone had to decide who had won the election and Al Gore agreed, as Nixon had done, that the Supreme Court had the final word) we got through a ritual of declaring that the Framers' system still works.
He said, "If we survive, when all this is over, I want to come back to this hotel for a week, when it opens again for tourists".
I want to be able to tell my children when this happened – if we survive the coming Dark Ages that this must inevitably produce.
