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Holocaust Quotes

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Holocaust Quotes

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.”

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Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“My china boy seemed to embody the way no story reaches us without having its heels chipped off or its face scratched away. And how lacunae and gaps are the constant companions of survival, its hidden engine, fueling its acceleration. How only trauma makes individuals — singly and unambiguously us — from the mass product. And yes, finally, the way in which I am the little boy, the product of mass manufacturing and also of the collective catastrophe of the last century, the survivor and unwitting beneficiary, here by some miracle.”

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Book:In Memory of Memory
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“There is a question asked frequently: which way of life is better, to secure food despite living in an authoritarian regime or to choose a democratic regime despite living hungry in it? No tyrant commits the mistake of feeding his slaves. Actually, the tyrant has already set up a such system of governance that, whatever the citizen does benefits him first. The system ensures that the citizen can never consume more than he has mercy on.”

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Author:Jeyhun Aliyev Silo
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“On a frosty December morning, with her best handbag, hat, and a small suitcase she handed over the keys to their flat to her maid and asked her to keep their most precious belongings safe there... Then she joined the disorderly progression of Jews heading for the Veletržní palác. Instead of taking something necessary and useful like tinned fish or packet soup, Anka carried a large hat box tied with string. In it were three dozen of her maid's delicious sugar-coated donuts, [her husband's] favorite treat... The young bride kept brushing her hair and reapplying her makeup. [The people around her] were even more intrigued when she knelt on the floor in her fine stockings to use her eyelash curlers. "I just wanted to look my best for the man I loved." A passage about Anka Bergman, a Czech Holocaust survivor, being transferred to the Theresienstadt ghetto”

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Book:Born Survivors
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“We can dismiss any notion that the Nazi regime murdered Jews in order to gratify German public opinion. It took elaborate precautions to hide these actions from the German people and from foreign observers. In official documents the responsible authorities referred to the killings with euphemisms like Sonderbehandlung (“special handling”), and undertook major operations to eliminate all traces of them, at a time when men and materiel could hardly be spared from the fighting. At the same time, there was no particular effort to keep the secret from German troops on the eastern front, many of whom were regularly assigned to participate. Some soldiers and officials photographed the mass executions and sent pictures home to their families and girlfriends.57 Many thousands of soldiers, civil administrators, and technicians stationed in the eastern occupied territories were eyewitnesses to mass killings. Many more thousands heard about them from participants. The knowledge inside Germany that dreadful things were being done to Jews in the east was “fairly widespread.” As long as disorderly destruction such as the shop-front smashings, beatings, and murders of Kristallnacht did not take place under their windows, most of them let distance, indifference, fear of denunciation, and their own sufferings under Allied bombing stifle any objections. In the end, radicalized Nazism lost even its nationalist moorings. As he prepared to commit suicide in his Berlin bunker in April 1945, Hitler wanted to pull the German nation down with him in a final frenzy. This was partly a sign of his character—a compromise peace was as unthinkable for Hitler as it was for the Allies. But it also had a basis within the nature of the regime: not to push forward was to perish. Anything was better than softness.59”

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Book:The Anatomy of Fascism
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“Аушвіц нависає чорним сонцем над європейською культурою й думкою. Він став універсальним мірилом політичного мислення, розбурхав мистецтво, романістику й літературну критику. Світ затавровано Аушвіцом — "безпрецедентною" подією, яка залишила пролом в історії і змусила людину переосмислити межі реальності. Аушвіц поглинув понад мільйон життів, перетворивши їх на дим. Газові камери продукували смерть повсякденно, механічно, не залишаючи відходів. "Виробництво трупів" на фабриці смері (організоване як на конвеєрній стрічці) стає парадигмою сучасного варварства, втіленням зла XX століття. Кількість жертв, які важко навіть уявити, а також індустріальний прогрес, обернений у зворотний бік (котрий вигубляє, замість того щоб виробляти), утвердили в нашій свідомості Аушвіц як центр знищення євреїв Європи. Саме на технократичному вимірі геноциду євреїв — убивстві газом Циклон Б, призначеним для позбавлення від бліх — тривалий час були зосереджені роздуми на Заході. Синонім абсолютного зла... Відтепер є історія до і після Аушвіца. Чи є література до і після Бабиного Яру? Бабин Яр довго залишався в тіні Аушвіца. Знищення в Бабиному Яру — не індустріальний геноцид, не спотворене дзеркало технічного прогресу. Незважаючи на те, що нацисти провели операцію 1005 зі знищення слідів злочинів, а також на Куренівську трагедію і подальшу забудову району, Бабин Яр досі зберігає останки жертв. Він — могила. До нього можна прийти і йому можна вклонитися [...] Неможливо оплакувати Аушвіц, він — чудовисько, він — машина-монстр, проте можливо проводити жалобні заходи біля Бабиного Яру, навіть якщо він позбавляє розуму [170—71].”

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Book:Бабин Яр: історія і пам'ять
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“To paraphrase Hannah Arendt—as portrayed in the recently released movie of the same name—the Nazi war criminal’s actions stemmed from her well-known phrase “banality of evil,” not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking. Their greatest error was delegating the process of thinking and decision-making to their higher ups. In Rudolf Höss’s case, this would have been his superiors, particularly Heinrich Himmler. To many this conclusion is troubling, for it suggests that if everyday, “normal,” sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future. Yet, this is exactly the lesson we must learn from the war criminals at Nuremberg. We must be ever wary of those who do not take responsibility for their actions. And we ourselves must be extra vigilant, particularly in this day of accelerated technological power, heightened state surveillance, and global corporate reach, that we do not delegate our thinking to others.”

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Author:Thomas Harding
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“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?”

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Book:Him With His Foot In His Mouth and Other Stories
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“We did not speak of what we had seen. At the time, to speak of it seemed worse than sacrilege: We had witnessed a thing so terrible that it acquired a dreadful holiness. It was a miracle of evil. It was not possible to say with words what we had witnessed, and so we kept it safely guarded until the time we could bring it out, and show it to others, and say, 'Behold. This is the worst thing man can do'.”

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Author:Irene Guy Opdyke
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“It’s true that the hatred is still there. But it doesn’t change anything. Our obligations are the same—to live and sanctify all life with our own. To participate in the world the best we know how, leaving it a better place than we found it. To raise families and teach our children to value life. What more can we do? Should we refuse to live because of the threat of death hanging over us? We’ve always been under sentence of death. Every generation that lives out its days in peace is a victory. Every day we live is a victory.”

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Book:A Damaged Mirror
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“Are you planning to give Anne a Bible for Hanukkah?" Margot asked, somewhat perturbed. "Yes...Well, maybe St. Nicholas Day would be a better occasion," Father replied. Jesus and Hanukkah don't exactly go together.”

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Book:Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition of the World’s Most Famous Diary
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“Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till 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. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason alone do we have to suffer now. We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or representatives of any country for that matter; we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too.”

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Author:Anne Frank
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“Thursday, 6 July, 1944 ... We all live, but we don't know the why or the wherefore. We all live with the object of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same. We three have been brought up in good circles, we have the chance to learn, the possibility of attaining something, we have all reason to hope for much happiness, but... we must earn it for ourselves. And that is never easy. You must work and do good, not be lazy and gamble, if you wish to earn happiness. Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.”

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Book:Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
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“Take the Holocaust for example: Why did God allow Hitler to kill millions of innocent Jews? Because God didn't want to step on Hitler's toes and interfere with his free will? That's a pretty lame excuse. What about the free will of all those Jews who died? I'm pretty sure that getting gassed to death was obviously not their choice. So, was the Holocaust part of God's great plan? Is that why he allowed it to happen? Is that why God didn't answer the prayers of all those Jews who begged him to make Hitler drop dead? Why didn't God just make Hitler have a heart attack before he could start World War 2? Why didn't he simply prevent Hitler from being born? How could a God who is supposed to be all good all the time allow something like the Holocaust? Or did God not just LET it happen? Maybe God MADE the Holocaust happen, because everything that happens, happens for a good reason? Are our minds simply too tiny, too inferior, to understand God's divine plan? Are we just too stupid to see the greater good that came out of the Holocaust? If that were true, and everything that happens, including the Holocaust, is part of God's perfect plan, then that means that Hitler really wasn't a bad man at all. He was actually doing God's work. And if Hitler did exactly what he was supposed to do in God's great plan, then Hitler obviously didn't have free will, but was just God's puppet. So that means Hitler was a good guy. A man of God. Sorry, but there is no religion in the world that could sell me on believing THAT bullshit.”

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Book:Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey
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“Look at me. You are the first person to ask about him. Do you understand? No one has ever asked about this man, your relative, Richard. No one has called him down. No one ever printed out his name. You are responsible now. You must remember him in order to honor him.”

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Book:Where the Angels Lived: One Family's Story of Exile, Loss, and Return
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“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.”

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Book:Life and Fate
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“God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, forget not their son who calls upon them now. You well know, You, source of all memory, that to forget is to abandon, to forget is to repudiate. Do not abandon me, God of my fathers, for I've never repudiated You. God of Israel, do not cast out a son of Israel who yearns with all his heart and all his soul to be linked to the history of Israel. God and King of the universe, exile me not from that universe. As a child I learned to revere You, to love You, to obey You; keep me from forgetting the child that I was. As an adolescent I chanted the litanies of the martyrs of Mainz and York; erase them not from my memory, You who erase nothing from Your own. As a man I learned to respect the will of our dead; Keep me from forgetting what I learned. God of my ancestors, let the bond between them and me remain whole, unbroken. You who have chosen to dwell in Jerusalem, let me not forget Jerusalem. You who wander with your people in exile, let me remember them. God of Auschwitz, know that I must remember Auschwitz. And that I must remind you of it. God of Treblinka, let the sound of that name make me, and You, tremble now and always. God of Belzec, let me, and You, weep for the victims of Belzec. You who share are suffering, You who share our weight, let me never be far from those who have invited You into their hearts. You who foresee the future of man, let me not cut myself off from my past. God of justice, be just to me. God of charity, be kind to me. God of mercy, plunge me not into the kaf-ha-kallah, the chasm where all life, hope and light are extinguished by oblivion. God of truth, Remember that without memory truth becomes only the mask of truth. Remember that only memory leads man back to the source of his longing for You. Remember, God of history, that You created man to remember. You put me into the world, You spared me in time of danger and death, That I might testify. What sort of witness would I be without my memory? Know, God, that I do not wish to forget you. I do not wish to forget anything. Not the living and not the dead. Not the voices and not the silences. I do not wish to forget the moments of abundance that enriched my life, nor the hours of anguish that drove me to despair. Even if you forget me, O Lord, I refuse to forget You.”

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Book:The Forgotten
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“It was an old hunter in camp and the hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of the buffalo and the stands he'd made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise with the dead animals scattered over the grounds and the herd beginning to mill and the riflebarrel so hot the wiping patches sizzled in the bore and the animals by the thousands and the tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of ground the teams of skinners spelling one another around the clock and the shooting and shooting weeks and months till the bore shot slick and the stock shot loose at the tang and their shoulders were yellow and blue to the elbow and the tandem wagons groaned away over the prairie twenty and twenty-two ox teams and the flint hides by the hundred ton and the meat rotting on the ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves half-crazed and wallowing in the carrion. I seen Studebaker wagons with six and eight ox teams headed out for the grounds not hauling a thing but lead. Just pure galena. Tons of it. On this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho there were eight million carcasses for that's how many hides reached the railhead. Two years ago we pulled out from Griffin for a last hunt. We ransacked the country. Six weeks. Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed them and come in. They're gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they'd never been at all. The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there's other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.”

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Book:Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
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“Perhaps it is this attitude, this mental turning away, or perhaps the combination of all these responses to calamity brought upon others, that one of Saul Bellow's characters, Artur Sammler, a survivor of the shooting pits in Poland, has in mind when he says: 'I know now that humankind marks certain people for death. Against them there shuts a door”

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Book:The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust
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“The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek those numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, but our humanity.”

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Book:Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
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“...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...”

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Book:Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
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“When the Nazis overran France in the spring of 1940, much of its Jewish population tried to escape the country. In order to cross the border south, they needed visas to Spain and Portugal, and tens of thousands of Jews, along with many other refugees, besieged the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux in a desperate attempt to get the life-saving piece of paper. The Portuguese government forbade its consuls in France to issue visas without prior approval from the Foreign Ministry, but the consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, decided to disregard the order, throwing to the wind a thirty-year diplomatic career. As Nazi tanks were closing in on Bordeaux, Sousa Mendes and his team worked around the clock for ten days and nights, barely stopping to sleep, just issuing visas and stamping pieces of paper. Sousa Mendes issued thousands of visas before collapsing from exhaustion. The Portuguese government – which had little desire to accept any of these refugees – sent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had deep respect for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.”

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Book:Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
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“Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.”

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Author:Piero Scaruffi
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“Карский и Пилецкий произвели на меня впечатление именно как личности, делавшие то, чего не делает большинство других людей. Они видели больше, чем страдания их собственного коллектива. С учетом сегодняшней тенденции идентифицировать себя с той или иной группой жертв, их поведение особенно интересно в моральном плане. Карский и Пилецкий видели страдания других. Для них не стоял вопрос о "конкуренции" жертв, который сегодня, пожалуй, решается еще труднее, чем тогда [160].”

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Book:Украинская история, российская политика, европейское будущее
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“However, research with activists in the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1950s and 1960s and of those who sheltered Holocaust survivors during World War II confirm that compassion, empathy, and social responsibility were core family values that motivated their actions. Once exercised in action, values of social responsibility and service to others may become integral to identity.”

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Book:Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification
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“It takes solidarity and generosity of spirit to build a society in which anyone can feel safe. Empathy can be hard to find, especially for people who look or sound different, or believe different things to us. But when we allow ourselves to be pitted against each other, and to be ruled by the meaner emotions, we dig our own graves alongside those of the people we abandon. It's only when we understand our essential commonality that we can protect ourselves: not as individual humans, but as members of an indivisible whole.”

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Book:The Poetry Pharmacy Returns: More Prescriptions for Courage, Healing and Hope
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