Best 455 quotes in «holocaust quotes» category

Harry H. Laughlin was highly important for the Nazi crusade to breed a “master race.” This American positioned himself to have a significant effect on the world’s population. During his career Laughlin would: ~ Write the “Model Eugenical Law” that the Nazis used to draft portions of the Nuremberg decrees that led to The Holocaust. ~ Be appointed as “expert” witness for the U.S. Congress when the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was passed. The 1924 Act would prevent many Jewish refugees from reaching the safety of U.S. shores during The Holocaust. ~ Provide the "scientific" basis for the 1927 Buck v. Bell Supreme Court case that made "eugenic sterilization" legal in the United States. This paved the way for 80,000 Americans to be sterilized against their will. ~ Defend Hitler's Nuremberg decrees as “scientifically” sound in order to dispel international criticism. ~ Create the political organization that ensured that the “science” of eugenics would survive the negative taint of The Holocaust. This organization would be instrumental in the Jim Crow era of legislative racism. H.H. Laughlin was given an honorary degree from Heidelberg University by Hitler's government, specifically for these accomplishments. Yet, no one has ever written a book on Laughlin. Despite the very large amount of books about The Holocaust, Laughlin is largely unknown outside of academic circles. The Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. gave this author permission to survey its internal correspondence leading up to The Holocaust and before the Institution retired Laughlin. These documents have not been seen for decades. They are the backbone of this book. The story line intensifies as the Carnegie leadership comes to the horrible realization that one of its most recognized scientists was supporting Hitler’s regime.

Have you noticed how the Holocaust deniers only ever quibble over the number of Jewish deaths? Now why is that? The answer is very simple: Because they are anti-Semitic. It really is that simple. Anti-Semitism is one of the most aggressive forces on the planet, and has been since Biblical times. Had the Holocaust been a purge of any other race or group of people, everyone would most likely accept the facts. Who, for example, disputes that at least 800,000 Rwandans died in the genocide that occurred during the Rwandan civil war? Or that around 1.7 million Cambodians died in the Cambodian killing fields?

He chuckles at his own joke. "No one wants the Jews. Not even America. Americans have no right to criticize us. They rounded up their Indians, you know. Put them on reservations.

He follows a man with a rolled up mattress strapped to his back. When he stepped down from the train into the brutalising glare of the searchlights in the marshalling yard he noticed two SS soldiers pointing at this man and laughing.

He had defended himself against death from without, and then it had carried him off from within.

He looked up to the tall spruce trees and noticed an eerie silence envelope the camp. Not a bird sang when the gates to Dachau opened. It seemed an evil-smelling place, and the dreary surroundings befitted this wicked establishment.

Here again, it occurred to me, was the unique problem that faces my generation, the generation of those who had been, say, seven or eight years old during the mid-1960s, the generation of the grandchildren of those who'd been adults when it all happened; a problem that will face no other generation in history. We are just close enough to those who were there that we feel an obligation to the facts as we know them; but we are also just far enough away, at this point, to worry about our own role in the transmission of those facts, now that the people to whom those facts happened have mostly slipped away.

Here. Here I am. You've taken everything from us, but not who we are! We still exist! One day grass will grow here and overgrow the ruins. Or day this will be forgotten. But you... No one will ever forget you! The shame of humanity.

High above us, the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.

He told me that what he owned and accumulated didn't matter. He still had his family. We still had our future. Go forward, You can't look back. It will destroy you if you do... Ever since that day, I have seen the world through a different prism.

Holocaust deniers will always come up with pathetic lies and red herrings aimed at deceiving and leading the gullible astray. Be it death toll anomalies, gas chamber debates, criticizing Holocaust denial laws, repeating the ancient myth that the “Joooz control the world,” blaming Israel, claiming Anne Frank’s diary is fabricated etc…etc…yada…yada…yawn…the list goes on. Why do the deniers persist? Because they have an agenda – and it isn't a nice agenda.

Hitler learned his eugenics from the infamous "Baur-Fischer-Lenz" book that documented American and British eugenics.

Holocaust deniers always have anti-Semitic beliefs and sympathies somewhere inside them. Always.

Holocaust survivors and their descendants are supposed to hate those who oppressed and killed them and their people. Black people are not. This is how anti-blackness works.

I am sitting here at thirty-six feeling like I am responsible for the holocaust for all that is toxic and wrong. Maybe it’s because I eat meat, and I stepped on three ants last Tuesday.

However intrinsically loony an idea may be, when people believe it, and act on that belief, it attains a power that can shape reality around it. A simple case in point is Nazi anti-Semitism. The fringe and utterly bogus notion that Jews represented a kind of biological contamination that had to be eradicated root and branch became the operative philosophy of a political regime and as a result millions of people died.

I am as if paralysed: over there in the chamber the gas people and we are supposed to sing!

Husk: Det er fremtidens diktatorer som skal bestemme hvilken gruppe mennesker som skal være <> neste gang.

I became a Libertarian as a result of researching WWII and the Holocaust. Individual liberty is sacred.

I become almost wild and shout at them: - To whom are you reciting Kaddish? Do you still believe? And what do you believe, whom are you thinking? Are you thanking the Lord for his mercy and taking away our brothers and sisters, our fathers and mothers? No, no! It is not true; there is no God. If there were a God, he would not allow such misfortune, such transgression, where innocent small children, only just born, or killed, by people who want only to to honest work and make themselves useful to the world are killed! and you, living witnesses of the great misfortune, remain thankful. Whom are you thanking?

I can’t recite the chronology or elaborate on the facts. I can’t explain the reasons or defend how we lived our lives. What I can tell you is how the events of 1933 sowed the seeds that fundamentally changed our future, that there was little hand-wringing or emotion, that circumstances were beyond control, that there was no recourse or appeal. I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.

I bend over more deeply and ask him again what happens here. — Don't you see? Here they take the lives of our nearest and dearest. Don't you see that these are the close of the poor wretches who come here?

I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.

I can’t recite the chronology or elaborate on the facts. I can’t explain the reasons or defend how we lived our lives. What I can tell you is how the events of 1933 sowed the seeds that fundamentally changed our future, that there was little hand-wringing or emotion, that circumstances were beyond control, that there was no recourse or appeal. I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal. Ralph Webster, A Smile in One Eye: a Tear in the Other

I could have been 23 next July I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.

If we don't stand up for others when they're persecuted, we lose the right to complain when it's done to us.

I didn't know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever.

I do not know where Viktor and Rudolf were taken. I cannot find the records. I never Elisabeth or Iggie. It is possible that they were taken to the Hotel Metropole, which has been sequestered as the headquarters of the Gestapo. There are many other lock-ups for this flood of Jews. They are beaten, of course; but they are also forbidden to shave or wash so that they look even more degenerate. This because it is important to address the old affront of Jews not looking like Jews. This processing of stripping away your respectability, taking away your watch-chain, or your shoes or your belt, so that you stumble to hold up your trousers with one hand, is a way of returning everyone to the shtetl, stripping you back to your essential character - wandering, unshaven, bowed with your possessions on your back. You are supposed to end up looking like a cartoon from Der Stuermer, Streicher's tabloid that is now sold on the streets of Vienna. They take away your reading glasses.

First night in the barracks. Moyshe Ettinger tells us how he saved himself and cannot forgive himself. The evening prayer is recited and Kaddish is set for the dead.

If we take the capsulation of minorities within the nation-state as a given condition, the implication of the Holocaust is that the life and liberties of minorities depend primarily upon whether the dominant group includes them within its universe of obligation; these are the bonds that hold or the bonds that break.

If you are a denier, get on the right side of history and stop being so gullible. Remember, it has been historically and scientifically proven, in a court of law no less, that more than 1.2 million Jews, along with 20,000 gypsies and tens of thousands of Polish and Russian political prisoners, were killed at Auschwitz alone. Beyond that, Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names has collected 4.5 million Jewish victims’ names (and counting) from various archival sources. How much more evidence could you possibly want?

Die Judenfrage,' it used to be called, even by Jews. 'The Jewish Question.' I find I quite like this interrogative formulation, since the question—as Gertrude Stein once famously if terminally put it—may be more absorbing than the answer. Of course one is flirting with calamity in phrasing things this way, as I learned in school when the Irish question was discussed by some masters as the Irish 'problem.' Again, the word 'solution' can be as neutral as the words 'question' or 'problem,' but once one has defined a people or a nation as such, the search for a resolution can become a yearning for the conclusive. Endlösung: the final solution.

I explained to him how, if God has created man with free will, He has to leave a back door open for unbelief despite all His revelations of Himself. For if He showed Himself to us too clearly, He would force us to believe and thus, having given us freedom with one hand, take it away with the other.

If we do not laugh, we will cry. Crying will only make us hotter and sweatier. We Jews like to joke about death because what you laugh at and make familiar can no longer frighten you. Besides, Chayaleh, what else is there to do?

I had survived the work gangs in the ghetto. Baked bread under cover of night. Hidden in a pigeon coop. Had a midnight bar mitzvah in the basement of an abandoned building. I had watched my parents be taken away to their deaths, had avoided Amon Goeth and his dogs, had survived the salt mines of Wieliczka and the sick games of Trzebinia. I had done so much to live, and now, here, the Nazis were going to take all that away with their furnace! I started to cry, the first tears I had shed since Moshe died. Why had I worked so hard to survive if it was always going to end like this? If I had known, I wouldn't have bothered. I would have let them kill me back in the ghetto. It would have been easier that way. All that I had done was for nothing.

I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle…. Writing in my mother tongue—at that point close to extinction—I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again…. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.

I have never been a very brave man," Uncle Moses said. "Nor I," Zalmann added. Eva smiled at them. "You are brave enough.

I have no notion of barbering and no idea what will happen if I cannot do the work. But I tell myself that after all it cannot be worse than dying…

[January 1944] As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock. Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So perhaps it is the other way around: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotic, who totter about in a screamed phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts! Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your daydreaming eyes would still be alive!

I'll have to become a good person on my own, without anyone to serve as a model or advise me, but it'll make me stronger in the end.

I made a painting that has holes in it. Why is there holes? Because God says to us, I cannot do all. I can create you, but I cannot do it all. You have to help Me fix the holes and put everything together. This is the learning from the Holocaust. That each of us is here to fix the holes. I don’t know how much you know about the Holocaust. What is your interest in it? What do you want to do with your life, where do you want to go? What is hurting in you? What are your holes to fix? What is now important in my life, and in your life also, is that after the Holocaust, we are shaking hands with each other, that we are nobody lesser than the other. That we understand the real meaning of what God created us for. You have the task. You have the task to better this world. There are holes in people also but those we create and can fix with love. God wants us whole.

I look around and think: Good God, what kind of hell is this?

I looked at him. He sat in the darkness, with his brows knitted tightly together, as though trying to grasp something, to understand the inconceivable, to pinpoint the moment when everything suddenly got out of control and the point of no return was officially passed by both sides – the future murderers and their victims. The new Reich sorted us into two kinds and now he suddenly found himself among those who held an ax above our miserable heads.

I'm not talking about YOUR book now, but look at how many books have already been written about the Holocaust. What's the point? People haven't changed... Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust.

In the knowing, there was peace.

In October 1941, Mahilue became teh first substantial city in occupied Soviet Belarus where almost all Jews were killed. A German (Austrian) policeman wrote to his wife of his feelings and experiences shooting the city's Jews in the first days of the month. 'During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.' pp. 205-206

In the daytime, I know that they're (Russians) close. But at night, my optimism abandons me, I buckle. The night is German, and who am I against the night?

In the end the real wealth of the Hungarian Jewish community had not been packed in crates and boxes and loaded onto that train. What is the value to a daughter of a single pair of Sabbath candlesticks passed down from her mother and grandmother before her, generation behind generation, for a hundred, even a thousand, years? Beyond price, beyond measure. And what of ten thousand pairs of similar candlesticks, when all the grandmothers, mothers, and daughters are dead? No more than the smelted weight of the silver. The wealth of the Jews of Hungary, of all of Europe, was to be found not in the laden boxcars of the Gold Train but in the grandmothers and mothers and daughters themselves, in the doctors and lawyers, the grain dealers and psychiatrists, the writers and artists who had created a culture of sophistication, of intellectual and artistic achievement. And that wealth, everything of real value, was all but extinguished.

I never really believed in Satan, or that there was pure evil in the world, until I came here.

It has often been said that Christian Poles did nothing to help Jews during the war. Don't believe it. There were indeed those who turned their backs on the hounded, hungry people who came to them in desperation; there were others who did their little bit to help where they realistically could, often not without some risk to themselves; and there were those who were ready to risk their lives and to share their last meal with a fugitive. I don't believe that in these matters the Polish people in the last war were different from any others caught in a similar stranglehold. And what is more, the rescued have no right to assume that they would automatically become rescuers if roles were reversed. We simply don't know, any of us, how we would react until put to the test. And the not-knowing troubles me. You see, I don't believe as many people do that courage is a characteristic like optimism or generosity; I think of it more as a mood, like laughter or sadness, a child of the moment, which might come to any of us in certain circumstances - and desert us in others.