Holocaust Memorial Quotes

Berlin seems like a place of healing to me though: you have both the Holocaust Memorial and Hiroshima Strasse side-by-side there. You have the whole last century libraried and you can see exactly what we did. Now there's lots of artists and musicians moving there because they can't afford the rent in London and New York, and they're having children and making it a gentle place. It seems to be a place of hope now. ~ Robert Montgomery

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. ~ Elie Wiesel

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. ~ William Sieghart

At the first Holocaust memorial commemoration in the Capitol Rotunda, both President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Mondale referred to the 'eleven million victims.' Carter also used Wiesenthal's figures of 'six million Jews and five million others' in his Executive Order establishing the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. I have attended Holocaust memorial commemorations in places as diverse as synagogues and army forts where eleven candles were lit. More significant is that strangers have repeatedly taken me and other colleagues to task for ignoring the five million non-Jews. When I explain that this is an invented concept, they become convinced of my ethnocentrism. ~ Deborah E. Lipstadt

It was Christians, you know, not Pagans, who were responsible for the Holocaust. It was Christians, not Pagans, who lynched people here in the South, who burned people at the stake, frequently in the name of this Jesus Christ. ~ Desmond Tutu

Estimated height in feet of a memorial tree planted for George Harrison that died in July after an attack by beetles : 15 ~ Anonymous

And each man stands with his face in the light. Of his own drawn sword, ready to do what a hero can. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

One night I heard one of the refugees say, "There are atrocities that one should not speak about."
"Why?" wondered another refugee.
"I can't explain it to you."
"You have to speak about everything, so that everyone will know what they did to us."
"I'm not going to argue with you."
"If we won't be witnesses, who will bear witness?"
"They won't believe us, anyway. ~ Aharon Appelfeld

Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?...

Take away the bomb threat and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening...
Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different? ~ Annie Dillard

I'm hugely fond of Scotland. My daughter, Jemma, was born in the Simpson Memorial Maternity Hospital in Edinburgh, and it always tickled me that she was so vexed she didn't have a Scottish accent even though she was brought up down south. ~ Rick Wakeman

Every generation must loose its innocence, must see the brightly painted nursery wall smashed away by the wrecking ball of betrayal to reveal a blighted landscape. For our predecessors, it was the Somme, the Great Depression, the Holocaust or Vietnam; for my generation, it was The Phantom Menace ~ David Mitchell

Here's the truth: the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons, and Iran doesn't have a single one. But when the world was on the brink of nuclear holocaust, Kennedy talked to Khrushchev and he got those missiles out of Cuba. Why shouldn't we have the same courage and the confidence to talk to our enemies? That's what strong countries do, that's what strong presidents do, that's what I'll do when I'm president of the United States of America. ~ Barack Obama

So yesterday the high-ranking visitors came after all. . . H[immler} at their head. A slight, insignificant-looking little man, with a rather good-humored face. High peaked cap, mustache, and small spectacles. I think: If you wanted to trace back all the misery and horror to just one person, it would have to be him. Around him a lot of fellows with weary faces. Very big, heavily dressed men, they swerve along whichever way he turns, like a swarm of flies, changing places among themselves (they don't stand still for a moment) and moving like a single whole. It makes a fatally alarming impression. (January 30, 1944) ~ David Koker

She had read enough about teenagers to understand you couldn't confront them directly. You couldn't even agree with them. The best strategy was to feign indifference to whatever wrong direction they were headed in, then plop in little facts, like Alka-Seltzers, round innocuous comments, let those sink in, take slow, antidotal effect . . . ~ Melissa Pritchard

We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam,
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh,
Each one of us avoided the hellfire. ~ Moshe Szulsztein

The obvious reductio ad absurdum is Holocaust deniers: Should their perspective be provided, for "balance," any time someone writes about the Holocaust? ~ Chris Mooney

Every two, three years there is a movie about the Holocaust because they want you to remember and they want you to be reminded of what it was. When was the last time you seen a movie about slavery? ~ Jamie Foxx

Even with the best intentions, you can have a nuclear war, a nuclear holocaust, through miscalculation, through accidents. ~ Mohamed ElBaradei

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

Sixty years after the end of the war, the time has come to make this information available. With the number of survivors and witnesses diminishing by the day, and the reality that the Holocaust is fading into the pages of history and memory, we should not have to wait any longer. ~ Abraham Foxman

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbor to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model of
thinking man than the most primitive pigmy or the most vicious sadist. ~ Primo Levi

Little by litter life returned to normal. The barbed wire which fenced us in did not cause us any real fear. We even thought ourselves rather well off; we were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic ... We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department - a whole government machinery.
Everyone marveled at it. We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares. Our fear and anguish were at an end. We were living among Jews, among brothers. ~ Elie Wiesel

Escape was not our goal since it was so unrealistic. What we wanted was to survive, to live long enough to tell the world what had happened in Buchenwald. ~ Jack Werber

The need has gone; the memorial thereof remains. ~ Ovid

And like all the people who lost no one, the tourists, who go to New York to cry over the rubble. I want to tell them to go home and hold their children or their lovers or their parents. I want to tell them that they are using that place as an excuse to be sad and afraid when there will be reason enough for that in their own lives if they just wait. ~ Philip Beard

In front of the mound: a mile of naked strangers. In groups of twenty, like smokes, they are directed to the other side by a man with a truncheon and a whip. It will not help to ink in his face. Several men with barrows collect clothes. There are young women still with attractive breasts. There are family groups, many small children crying quietly, tears oozing from their eyes like sweat. In whispers people comfort one another. Soon, they say. Soon. No one wails and no one begs. Arms mingle with other arms like fallen limbs, lie like shawls across bony shoulders. A loose gray calm descends. It will be soon . . . soon. A grandmother coos at the infant she cuddles, her gray hair hiding all but the feet. The baby giggles when it's chucked. A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The color of the sky cannot be colored in. So the son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy's wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered - look, ~ William H. Gass

Missing someone is the reverberating echo of everything beautiful about her - her laugh, her song, her touch, her smell, the power of her words, and the constant shadow that lingers on as her perfect image in your memory. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Hope, the proven ingredient of Nazi deception, was at its height. ~ Thomas Toivi Blatt

The Los Angeles parade would begin in Griffith Park, where a large crowd would assemble and the speeches would be given. Every politician of consequence would be there. There was no way they would miss a chance to publicly praise the troops and honor those who had lost their lives in service.
Some of the tributes would be sincere and heartfelt, and some less so. But participating in the event, vowing undying support for the U.S. military, was an absolute must to maintain political viability. It was okay to vote to cut funds for veterans' healthcare, but don't dare miss a chance to jump on the Memorial Day bandwagon. ~ David Rosenfelt

Arab youth are taught to wonder, 'Since the Holocaust was a European affair, why are the Palestinians being forced to pay for the creation of Israel?' ~ Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

We Brits print banknotes out in Debden in Essex, and have contracted it out to the private sector. Here in the U.S. it is a government operation right in the heart of Washington next door to the Holocaust Museum. ~ Evan Davis

The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map. ~ Fern Schumer Chapman

The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice. ~ Iris Chang

The whole memorial is for different senses ... seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling. I probably would have come up with something different if I had not lived through it. ~ Lawrence Halprin

The drug war is a holocaust in slow motion. ~ David Simon

On what rests the hope of the republic? One country, one language, one flag! ~ Alexander Henry

Rare is the human spirit that remains buoyant in a holocaust. ~ Charles C. Mann

The Nazis victimized some people for what they did, some for what they refused to do, some for what they were, and some for the fact that they were. ~ John Horton Conway

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.
From an Irish headstone ~ Richard Puz

In all, the American military, the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other agencies used at least 1,000 ex-Nazis and collaborators as spies and informants after the war, according to Richard Breitman, a Holocaust scholar at American University who was on a government-appointed team that declassified war-crime records. ~ Anonymous

We almost began a perfect conversation, F. said as he turned on the six o'clock news. He turned the radio
very loud and began to shout wildly against the voice of the commentator, who was reciting a list of disasters.
Sail on, sail on, O Ship of State, auto accidents, births, Berlin, cures for cancer! Listen, my friend, listen to the
present, the right now, it's all around us, painted like a target, red, white, and blue. Sail into the target like a
dart, a fluke bull's eye in a dirty pub. Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. Don't forget your
memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colors that it needs but somewhere else, hoist your memory
on the Ship of State like a pirate's sail, and aim yourself at the tinkly present. Do you know how to do this?
Do you know how to see the akropolis like the Indians did who never even had one? Fuck a saint, that's how,
find a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar,
dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on
for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but
who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of these quaint impossible cunts and fuck her for your
life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled ~ Leonard Cohen

Hollywood would make a holocaust an animated comedy if people would pay to see it; they don't care ... they just want your money. ~ Adam Green

Then imitate the action of the tiger; stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. ~ William Shakespeare

Psychologist Carl Jung, in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul, wrote, "About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time."3 Jung wrote those words in the early part of the twentieth century, but with every passing year and decade their truth has become even more glaring. Holocaust ~ David Jeremiah

In class I was out of place because I could so easily be distracted from concepts by metaphors and facts. Clearly, I was less intelligent than I had hoped, and I felt frustrated by an inarticulate notion that something was wrong if old material was processed as if the immediate past and the uncertain future had no bearing on it. ~ Ruth Kluger

You are making music
in the shadow of the gallows. ~ Paul B. Janeczko

The Holocaust happened in Europe, and that's important to how it is viewed. Had Europeans done such a thing in the far corners of the earth, rather than on their own doorstep, it might not be mentioned in the history books. ~ Jamaica Kincaid