Holocaust Quotations: Windows to the Past
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| Ken Roman 1945 |
I have gathered numerous quotations from the web. But I have also included quotes from my late cousin, Ken Roman, and from his friend the late Joe Korzenik. They were both imprisoned in Flossenburg concentration camp during World War Two. (Ken wrote extensively about their friendship in his memoirs.)
It is my hope that these quotations will raise awareness and lead to an increase of knowledge and understanding. But most of all, that it compels each one of us to speak out whenever there is hatred, racism, anti-semitism, and religious intolerance. We must defend democracy and peace.
Could you imagine that 10,000 people go into a large hall or stadium and never come out, and then can you imagine that this happens 600 times.
Joe Korzenik (was a Holocaust Survivor, and friend of Ken Roman)
We lived a provisional existence of unknown limits, with only one exit through the chimney.
Ken Roman (was a Holocaust Survivor)
It is you the new generation who must be vigilant, not to allow, Racism,
Religious Intolerance to poison and spread hatred. To make sure that “ WE
REMEMBER FOR THE FUTURE” that the
HOLOCAUST never happens again.
Ken Roman
How can we forget the smell of the burning flesh. The hunger that drove
you nearly mad. Living like animals, not human beings. We were in this
situation for no other reason than that we were Jewish.
Lily Ebert (is a Holocaust Survivor)
Get it
all on record now—get the films, get the witnesses—because somewhere down the
road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commanding General of the Allied Forces
To forget would not
only be dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing
them a second time.
Elie Wiesel
Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
We in the United States should be all the more thankful for the freedom and religious tolerance we enjoy. And we should always remember the lessons learned from the Holocaust, in hopes we stay vigilant against such inhumanity now and in the future.
Charlie Dent
I have not changed my
opinion that the Holocaust is a trauma of European civilization.
Imre Kertesz
This is why I am a
Zionist: because Diaspora leads to hatred and the Holocaust.
A.B. Yehoshua
Anti-Semitism is a noxious weed
that should be cut out. It has no place in America.
William Howard Taft
I went to Israel for two months
in 1970 and worked on a kibbutz. It affected me on levels that I hadn't
anticipated, working on a daily basis with people who were actual survivors of
the Holocaust.
Chris Claremont
Racial prejudice, anti-Semitism,
or hatred of anyone with different beliefs has no place in the human mind or heart.
Billy Graham
The Holocaust illustrates the
consequences of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on a society. It forces us
to examine the responsibilities of citizenship and confront the powerful
ramifications of indifference and inaction.
Tim Holden
The radio even weren't allowed to
say there was a Holocaust and people were being killed right, left and center
in these terrible camps.
Patrick Macnee
It is deeply shocking and
incomprehensible to me that despite volumes of documentation and living witnesses
who can attest to the horrors of the Holocaust, there are still those who would
deny it.
Mark Udall
There is simply no room for anti-Semitism
in a democratic and law-abiding state.
Aleksander Kwasniewski
My mother and father had been
through the Holocaust. The family was wiped out. I grew up never knowing aunts,
uncles, or grandparents.
Elizabeth Diller
In the First World War, there was
the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these
emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder,
like the Holocaust.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
The Holocaust committed by the
Nazis turned this country, where most of the European Jews used to live and
where their culture used to flourish, into a massive grave. This is why
initiatives to revive Jewish culture in Poland is so important.
Marek Belka
It was commonplace to hear it
said, after the Bosnian genocide kicked off in 1992 and the Rwandan genocide
erupted in 1994 and the Darfur genocide began in 2003, that the 'international
community' had learned nothing since the Holocaust.
Terry Glavin
In Germany, of course, the
Holocaust will always be in our history and a big stain on our lives.
Barbara Sukowa
There's a lot going on in the
world that's very disturbing: rewriting the Holocaust; pseudo-historians
rewriting history itself. And we're dealing with a terrorist mentality that
involves whole nations.
Joel Grey
When somebody says that six
million people died in the Holocaust, there is nobody in the world who can
understand that. It's only through story, reading books by Elie Wiesel or Primo
Levi, that you really begin to understand the trauma and how horrible it
actually was.
Uzodinma Iweala
One of the truly horrible things
about the Holocaust is that it doesn't end in 1945. It keeps affecting our
lives in the way we think, and it will affect the way our children see the
world.
Mark Kurlansky
For your
benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims
must be Jews. It can also be other people. We saw it begin in Germany with
Jews, but people from more than twenty other nations were also murdered.
Simon Wiesenthal
The Holocaust
manifested the veneer of civilization so thin and fragile that repetition was
possible.
Sam Kaltman
Thou shalt not
be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be
a bystander.
Yehuda Bauer
What I want you
to take away from my life story is just how important it is to defend your
freedom, at all costs. Experience has shown me that if you lose your freedom,
you are condemned to fail.
Leon Schagrin
I certainly think that another
Holocaust can happen again. It did already occur: think of Cambodia, Rwanda,
and Bosnia.
Miep Gies
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
I worry about global
anti-Semitism - not just as a bad idea that originates from bad people, but
also as something that arises as a challenge to global order.
Timothy D. Snyder
Anti-Semitism is the hatred that
never dies. Violence that begins with the Jews never ends with them. All of
this is true. What's also true is that anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred in
the world because individual people have sustained it in every generation. It
cannot be defeated until we look these people and their ideologies in the face.
Bari Weiss
I find it shameful that in nearly
all the universities of Europe, Palestinian students sponsor and nurture
anti-Semitism.
Oriana Fallaci
Like many physical diseases,
anti-Semitism is highly infectious, and can become endemic in certain
localities and societies. Though a disease of the mind, it is by no means
confined to weak, feeble, or commonplace intellects; as history sadly records,
its carriers have included men and women of otherwise powerful and subtle
thoughts.
Paul Johnson
I didn't know I was Jewish until
I encountered anti-Semitism at the age of 10, when my best friend told me I
couldn't come to their house because I was a Jew.
Peter Eisenman
Montreal is a very cosmopolitan,
sophisticated, erudite, educated, glorious city today. But it wasn't quite that
way when I was growing up there. There was a lot of anti-Semitism. And I had to
deal with that in an area of the city that had very few Jews.
William Shatner
Anti-Semitism was a constant
presence in the campaign after it became known I was Jewish.
Annamie Paul
There's got to be a zero
tolerance to racism, anti-Semitism, any form of division and intolerance.
Erin O'Toole
The growing tide of anti-Semitism
shocks the conscious of everyone who values freedom, and the ugly, hateful acts
particularly stain the character of democracies where liberty and religious
freedom are supposed to be respected.
Mike Ferguson
The disappearance of the Jewish
state will not mean the disappearance of anti-Semitism.
Jack Schwartz
I myself think anti-Semitism is
about envy.
Joseph Epstein
Given the long history of global
anti-Semitism and continued calls for the destruction of Israel, it's tough to
be a Jew.
Nell Scovell
Seriously, I faced a lot of
anti-Semitism playing hockey as a kid. It motivated me to play well and to
punch everyone who was anti-Semitic. I was taunted and called names. I'd either
beat them with a goal or with my fists.
Harley Pasternak
Anti-Semitism has been a fact of
European life for more than 2,000 years.
Bari Weiss
Anti-Semitism is real in this country.
Kamala Harris
The Internet has been this miraculous conduit to the undeniable truth to the Holocaust.
Steven Spielberg
The truth about the Holocaust must not die. Andrzej Duda
To this day we know there are those who insist the Holocaust never happened, a denial of a fact or truth that is baseless, ignorant and hateful”… This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history - I will not forget what I have seen here today. These sights have not lost their horror over time.
President Barack Obama
(on his visit to Buchenwald Concentration Camp, June 5, 2009)
I will never be able to go back to Sweden without knowing inside myself that I'd done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible.
Raoul Wallenberg
We need this unity, of Europe, of the international community, because today, in our democracy, anti-Semitism is resurging — violent, brutal, it is here. And with it, its parade of hate and intolerance. With it, racism. Anti-Semitism, I say it here clearly, is not only the problem of Jews. No. It is first and foremost the problem of others. Because each time in our history, anti-Semitism always preceded the weakening of democracy, it translated our inability to accept others. It is always the first form of rejection of the other. And when anti-Semitism appears, all racism spreads. All divisions propagate. Nobody comes out of this winning.
President of France Emmanuel Macron
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
If the Catholic Church hadn't so consistently and virulently condemned the Jews for killing Jesus, there would have been no Holocaust. There would have been no reason for anyone to think about picking on Jews.
Pat Condell
I can guarantee you this, the days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over! We are no longer scattered among the nations, powerless to defend ourselves. We restored our sovereignty in our ancient home. And the soldiers who defend our home have boundless courage. For the first time in 100 generations, we, the Jewish people, can defend ourselves.
Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke
After being saved by a Righteous Rescuer, in the hope that my experience will be an incentive for students to realize that no matter how risky, they must always try to help people who are facing discrimination
Erna Anolik (a Holocaust survivor)
We must stay together. We must hold hands and stay together. There's not any room in our society, our community, for racism, for bigotry, for anti-Semitism. We must walk together. We must keep the faith…
U.S. Representative John R. Lewis