quotations about the Holocaust
In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again.
ANNE FRANK
diary, July 15, 1944
We are laying the foundation for some new, monstrous civilization.
TADEUSZ BOROWSKI
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
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.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism
What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life -- that is what is abnormal.
ELIE WIESEL
interview, O: The Oprah Magazine, November 2000
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
ELIE WIESEL
Night
I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
ELIE WIESEL
Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1986
If all Hitler had done was kill people in vast numbers more efficiently than anyone else ever did, the debate over his lasting importance might end there. But Hitler's impact went beyond his willingness to kill without mercy. He did something civilization had not seen before. Genghis Khan operated in the context of the nomadic steppe, where pillaging villages was the norm. Hitler came out of the most civilized society on Earth, the land of Beethoven and Goethe and Schiller. He set out to kill people not for what they did but for who they were. Even Mao and Stalin were killing their "class enemies". Hitler killed a million Jewish babies just for existing.
NANCY GIBBS
Time Magazine, January 3, 2000
Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.
PRIMO LEVI
Survival in Auschwitz
Auschwitz existed within history, not outside of it. The main lesson I learned there is simple: We Jews should never, ever become like our tormentors.
HAJO MEYER
"An Ethical Tradition Betrayed", Huffington Post, January 27, 2010
The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.
IAN KERSHAW
attributed, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-45
How incredibly avaricious the whole operation was, the way they made the Jews pay for their tickets in the railway cars to the death camps. Yeah, and the rates for a third-class ticket, one way. And half price for children.... It was a kind of exploration of evil. Just how bad can we get?
MARTIN AMIS
"Martin Amis Contemplates Evil", Smithsonian Magazine, Sep. 2012
The duty of the survivor is to bear testimony to what happened... You have to warn people that these things can happen, that evil can be unleashed. Race hatred, violence, idolatries--they still flourish.
ELIE WIESEL
"Will Hatred Ever End?", The Watchtower, June 15, 1995
What exactly was the difference? He wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?
JOHN BOYNE
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
The things I saw beggar description... The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were . . . overpowering. . . . I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda."
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
attributed, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information.
JEAN AMERY
At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities
There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Gesammelte Schriften: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft
It was at Auschwitz/Birkenau, though, that my personal connection to the Holocaust was both shattered and framed. As I was walking toward the entrance of the former camp, I was talking with an elderly American couple who had been inmates there, and had returned for the first time since the war. Inside the main camp, I was struck by how normal it all was. My world had not stopped as I passed under the infamous arch. To paraphrase Wiesel, the sky was blue, the birds were singing, it was clean and orderly.
FRANKLIN BIALYSTOK
"Emerging from the Shadow", Teaching about the Holocaust
When I turned to the topic of Holocaust denial, I knew that I was dealing with extremist antisemites who have increasingly managed, under the guise of scholarship, to camouflage their hateful ideology. However, I did not then fully grasp the degree to which I would be dealing with a phenomenon far more unbelievable than was my previous topic. On some level it is as unbelievable as the Holocaust itself and, though no one is being killed as a result of the deniers' lies, it constitutes abuse of the survivors. It is intimately connected to a neofascist political agenda. Denial of the Holocaust is not the only thing I find beyond belief. What has also shocked me is the success deniers have in convincing good-hearted people that Holocaust denial is an "other side" of history--ugly, reprehensible, and extremist--but an other side nonetheless. As time passes and fewer people can personally challenge these assertions, their campaign will only grow in intensity.
DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory
The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is there Holocaust denial--there's Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn't happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children's shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews.
SAM HARRIS
"Why Don't I Criticize Israel?", July 24, 2014
Bread, soup -- these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.
ELIE WIESEL
Night