Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Holocaust.
...Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.
John Boyne
Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who stop to consider the antithesis; that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.
Primo Levi
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.
Anne Frank
Part of her revolted against the insanity of the rules. Part of her was grateful. In a world of chaos, any guidelines helped. And she knew that each day she remained alive, . One plus one plus one. The Devil's arithmetic...
Jane Yolen
Do not be a perpetrator. Do not be a bystander. Do not be a victim.
Yehuda Bauer
Sin embargo, conocà a muchos internados que supieron ser fieles a su dignidad humana hasta el mismo fin. Los nazis lograron degradarlos fÃsicamente, pero no fueron capaces de rebajarlos moralmente.Gracias a estos pocos, no he perdido totalmente mi fe en la humanidad. Si en la misma jungla de Birkenau no todos fueron necesariamente inhumanos con sus hermanos hombres, indudablemente hay todavÃa esperanzas.Esta esperanza es la que me hace vivir.
Olga Lengyel
' 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. : the final solution.
Christopher Hitchens
Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then I had not been interested in the Church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty
Albert Einstein
To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns out to be not even a Holocaust denier but a Holocaust affirmer. There has to be a moral limit, and either this has to be it or we must cease pretending to ourselves that we observe one.
What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so . I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge.
If there is a God, he'll have to beg my forgiveness.
Anonymous
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.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances - to choose one's own way.
Victor Frankl
In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.
...That we must never forgive would seem to follow from the same stern logic. For if we forgive, it will be a sign to those in the future that they can act without fear of punishment, and that the world has a moral escape valve labeled 'forgiveness' that permits evil not only to survive but to thrive...Forgiveness becomes a 'weak' virtue, one that Christians seem particularly prone to champion, and one that always carries the possibility of condoning, rather than constricting, the spread of evil.note: opinion written about the Holocaust
Robert McAfee Brown, attributed
For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews.
Simon Wiesenthal
