Best 455 quotes in «holocaust quotes» category

Who are the moneylenders? They are those who were driven out of the Temple by Christ Himself 2000 years ago. They are those who never work but live on fraud.

Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly uptill now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.

Why is it, that there's no movies, very little very little attention about the greatest Holocaust in the history of the world which was the Holocaust against Christians by the Soviet communism.And that's my point. We have a controlled media today that talks about the Holocaust, but they don't talk about the death and destruction of tens of millions of Christians...Which was a bigger Holocaust.

With the children of Holocaust survivors, there is always a very close relationship. You grow with the sense that you are parenting your parents and - with this kind of responsibility to protect them. That's what makes the children of Holocaust survivors strange.

WWII is something contemporary readers already know a lot about. If our schools are doing their jobs, they know about the invasion of Normandy, the Hitler Youth, the Holocaust, and at least a few of the horrors of the Eastern Front.

Yet, nearly 6 decades after the Holocaust concluded, Anti-Semitism still exists as the scourge of the world.

Would PBS go so far as to give air time to an even more extreme kind of disinformer, a Holocaust denier?

All our ancestors were murdered, murderers, complicit to murder, or combating murder.

All of them, before their imprisonment in concentration camps, had been decent people in private life, many indeed highly respected citizens, who had never come up against the law, but were set apart only by their homosexual feelings. Al of these otherwise decent people had been assembled here, in this melting pot of disgrace and torment, for extermination through back-breaking labor, hunger, and torture. None of them were child molesters or had had sex with children or adolescents, as all of these had a green triangle. Were we with our pink triangle really outrageous criminals and "degenerates", a menace to society?

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

After the prayer they executed an armed robbery. That sounds very strange this many years later: prayer and then armed robbery.

And so the picture that I showed her that Sunday, a picture I'd seen countless times since I was a boy, brought home to me for the first time the strangeness of my relationship to the people I was interviewing, people who were rich in memories but poor in keepsakes, whereas I was so rich in the keepsakes but had no memories to go with them.

And you just said ‘yes’?” “We could use the money.” “Did you take money for saving the Jews?” Conversation between ‘BB’ and his wife Grete The Informer by Steen Langstrup

And you wanted to escape,' a man near me whispered to another man. 'You wanted to run off into the woods and fight. But do you see? Do you see what the rest of them think about us? These people would sell you back to the Nazis for a sack of potatoes and then toast you at their dinner table.

All were expecting to die, and every day of their life was a day of suffering and torment. All had witnessed terrible crimes, and the Germans would have spared none of them; the gas chambers awaited them. Most, in fact, were sent to the gas chambers after only a few days of work, and were replaced by people from new contingents. Only a few dozen people lived for weeks and months, rather than for days and hours; these were skilled workers, carpenters and stonemasons, and the bakers, tailors and barbers who ministered to the Germans' everyday needs. These people created an Organizing Committee for an uprising. It was of course, only the already-condemned, only people possessed by an all-consuming hatred and a fierce thirst for revenge, who could have conceived such an insane plan. They did not want to escape until they had destroyed Treblinka. And they destroyed it.

All truth-seekers should study the genocide that was the Holocaust and ask themselves how on Earth this event was 'allowed' to occur, keeping in mind allowed is the correct term as there was no shortage of witnesses, including those all over Europe who stood by and did nothing to intervene. If those bystanders hadn’t just stood by, perhaps the history books would tell a different story.

Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary--he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived. Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us.

American newspapers frequently offered praise for eugenics just prior to WWII and The Holocaust .... that is, until Hitler revealed what eugenics really looked like. They avoided the subject for decades thereafter.

Amitai shook his head, almost smiling, because here he was, feeling for the first time that the tragedy of European Jewry did belong to him. Before today, his lack of personal connection to the Holocaust had made it a distant history, no more relevant to him than any other. But Natalie, the locket, the painting, the Hall of Names, taking responsibility for Komlos in the Pages of Testimony, these had brought him to he realization that, merely by virtue of being a Jew, even a Jew from another place and time, it was his history, too. Not personally, but collectively. It belonged to him, as he belonged to all those Jews rising up into the infinite ceiling in the Hall of Names. He and Natalie were in the same place, but they had come from different directions.

And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses: when ordered to, they gave their support to this slaughter, voting in favour of it amid a hubbub of voices. There was something unexpected in their degree of obedience... The extreme violence of the totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.

An older woman begs me to tell her if all the men are kept alive as labourers. She knows that she is going to her death. Still, she will be happy if her son, who came with her, remains alive. I calm her with my answer and she thanks me.

Another crucial thing to question is why deniers even bother to quibble about the number of deaths. If one day it were proven only five million or 5.5 million Jews were exterminated, would it be any less an atrocity? What number would deniers suggest is low enough to say that genocide didn't occur and that it’s not important that humanity remembers the Holocaust and the lessons learnt?

Anticipating their calamity and fright when deportation day came (August 6, 1942) he [Henryk Goldszmit, pen name: Janusz Korczak] joined them aboard the train bound for Treblinka, because, he said, he knew his presence would calm them—“You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this.” A photograph taken at the Umschlagplatz (Transshipment Square) shows him marching, hatless, in military boots, hand in hand with several children, while 192 other children and ten staff members follow, four abreast, escorted by German soldiers. Korczak and the children boarded red boxcars not much larger than chicken coops, usually stuffed with seventy-five vertical adults, though all the children easily fit. In Joshua Perle’s eyewitness account in The Destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, he describes the scene: “A miracle occurred, two hundred pure souls, condemned to death, did not weep. Not one of them ran away. None tried to hide. Like stricken swallows they clung to their teacher and mentor, to their father and brother, Janusz Korczak.” In 1971, the Russians named a newly discovered asteroid after him, 2163 Korczak, but maybe they should have named it Ro, the planet he dreamed of. The Poles claim Korczak as a martyr, and the Israelis revere him as one of the Thirty-Six Just Men, whose pure souls make possible the world’s salvation. According to Jewish legend, these few, through their good hearts and good deeds, keep the too-wicked world from being destroyed. For their sake alone, all of humanity is spared. The legend tells that they are ordinary people, not flawless or magical, and that most of them remain unrecognized throughout their lives, while they choose to perpetuate goodness, even in the midst of inferno.

A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, 'Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?

Arendt, as we have seen, is committed to understanding totalitarianism in its complete novelty, as an unprecedented phenomenon. It is unprecedented in the strict sense that it does not just represent a novel variation with respect to the categories defining forms of government that we have long held… historically, mankind ‘even in its darkest periods, granted the slain enemy the right to be remembered, as a self-evident acknowledgment of the fact that we are all men’ (Arendt 1968a: 452). What was attempted in the camps was neither punishment nor persecution but obliteration, such that even death was robbed of its meaning, ‘making martyrdom, for the first time in history, impossible.

Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, 'good time' and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of the living damnation?

As other (previously lost) eyewitness accounts verifying Hitler’s and the Nazis’ detailed plans to annihilate the Jewish people are recovered by historians each passing decade, Holocaust deniers’ attempts to defend the Third Reich against accusations of genocide become more and more feeble. No, make that more and more laughable.

As you can no doubt imagine, we often say in despair, 'What's the point of the war? Why, oh, why can't people live together peacefully? Why all this destruction?' I don't believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago! There's a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start all over again!

An inch of gold can't buy an inch of time

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

Auschwitz was a much safer place to be than Dresden or any other city of any size in Germany from 1943 onward.

Because they are ignorant and their parents are ignorant. Because they don’t know any better.” Pastel Orphans

Because they are ignorant and their parents are ignorant. Because they don’t know any better.

Believe it or not, many people are so fearful of Jewish people – whether they be Jews in Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia or wherever – they are convinced this tiny minority of 13 million people is secretly ruling the world’s 7.5 billion people AND can effortlessly revise any episode of history AND can fake such well-documented and scientifically-proven historical events as the Holocaust.

Bigotry against any group should be disqualifying for high office.

Birkenau simmered in the July sun like some hideous brew, a witch's potion of blood, sweat, smoke, and excrement worthy of something the weird sisters might have cooked up in Macbeth.

Both incest and the Holocaust have been subject to furious denial by perpetrators and other individuals and by highly organised groups such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the Committee for Historical Review. Incest and the Holocaust are vulnerable to this kind of concerted denial because of their unfathomability, the unjustifiability, and the threat they pose to the politics of patriarchy and anti-Semitism respectively. Over and over, survivors of the Holocaust attest that they were warned of what was happening in Poland but could not believe it at the time, could not believe it later as it was happening to them, and still to this day cannot believe what they, at the same time, know to have occurred. For Holocaust deniers this is a felicitous twist, for their arguments denying the Holocaust and therefore the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state capitalize on the discrepancies of faded memory. In the case of incest, although post-traumatic stress disorder, amnesia, and dissociation represent some of the mind's strategies for comprehending the incomprehensible, incest deniers have taken advantage of inconsistencies to discredit survivor testimony.

Brave people are not the ones who aren't afraid. Those are reckless people who ignore the risk; they put themselves and others in danger. That's not the sort of person I want on my team. I need the ones who know the risk-- whose legs shake, but carry on.

Bringing up wrongdoings of the Israeli government is therefore about as relevant to the Holocaust as mentioning the warmongering decisions of recent US administrations in relation to the slaughter of Native Americans when America was first colonized centuries ago. In other words, whatever your opinion of Israel’s handling of the Middle East conflict – and we ourselves have some misgivings on that matter – that is in no way shape or form related to the facts of the Holocaust.

But Anja. I hear Anja's voice. Maybe I am insane. I hear her crying. I see her alone in the trees. I remember being alone and humiliated. I remember, too, the fat little boy hiding in the bathroom. And I see this man, Ariane. I see this evil man, Ariane. He laughs everyday still. He has had years of laughter. He has triumphed over the screams of others, he has triumphed with blood on his hands. And he laughs still. God has cursed us! He has either cursed us or He was never here to begin with. We've pretended God was here for our own sanity! That's the truth! We've pretended evil is punished and good is rewarded. A perfect scheme!

But I can't help thinking about the graves I saw on this summer's trip, and the millions of people in them, and the millions more without graves. The ones who are smoke. And I find that I can feel it, at last. Or that I've always felt it, without knowing what it was: the Holocaust, roaring down the generations like a wave of radiation, eradicating, in everyone it touches, the ability to trust people, experience joy; fall in love, believe in love when you see it in others. ("Dancing Men")

But here God didn't come. We were all on our own.

But miracles still happen, even if we don't think they do.

Even if we, as northerners, choose to ignore this history, the victims’ descendants will not

[F]or me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. 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. It is also more binding than basic formulas of Jewish existence. If to myself and the world, including the religious and nationally minded Jews, who do not regard me as one of their own, I say: I am a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number.

Gandhi, convinced of the power of satyagraha, suggested that it be used by the Jews against the Nazis. In response, Martin Buber – who had earlier (1930) written that much could be learned from Gandhi – said that this method could not be used against the Nazis. It is one thing to use nonviolent methods against those who would deprive you of some material benefit, but if their basic aim is to deprive you of life itself, how can you resist nonviolently?

At one point Malkin and one of his colleagues took Eichmann to the toilet. They waited outside. After a few minutes, Eichmann called out to Malkin, ‘Darf ich anfangen?’ (‘May I begin?’) Only when told yes did he begin to move his bowels. The Eichmann Trial, page 17

But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative.

But then, staring at the label on one crate, which read SWORD-CANE-DLUBECK SHOE TREE-HORA SUITS (3)-HORA ASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)-HORA Josef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not going to matter one iota how his father and the others behaved. Orderly or chaotic, well inventoried and civil or jumbled and squabbling, the Jews of Prague were dust on the boots of the Germans, to be whisked off with an indiscriminate broom. Stoicism and an eye for detail would avail them nothing. In later years, when he remembered this moment, Josef would be tempted to think that he had suffered a premonition, looking at those mucilage-caked labels, of the horror to come. At the time it was a simpler matter. The hair stood up on the back of his neck with a prickling discharge of ions. His heart pulsed in the hollow of his throat as if someone had pressed there with a thumb. And he felt, for an instant, that he was admiring the penmanship of someone who had died.

...But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew passing through some abstract notion of death 5.7 million times. It means countless individuals who nevertheless have to be counted, in the middle of life...