Holocaust Quotes

• The Holocaust is not only a tragedy of the Jewish people, it is a failure of humanity as a whole.

  Moshe Katsav

  People, Humanity, Tragedy

  "Anger amid the tears - did the allies do enough to save Jews?" by Owen Bowcott, www.theguardian.com. January 28, 2005.

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• For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.

  Simon Wiesenthal

  Men, History, Evil

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• I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

  Elie Wiesel

  Peace, Bystanders, History

  Elie Wiesel (2011). “From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences”, p.170, Schocken

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• In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

  Anne Frank

  Believe, Heart, Thinking

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• For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.

  Elie Wiesel

  War, Bears, Bearing Witness

  "Elie Wiesel, Nobel winner and Holocaust survivor, dies aged 87" by Alan Yuhas, www.theguardian.com. July 2, 2016.

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• The things I saw beggar description ... The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where there were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda".

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Men, Hands, Order

  "Commemorating The 70th Anniversary Of Liberation", www.ushmm.org.

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• 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

  Suffering, Example, Bears

  Anne Frank, General Press (2016). “The Diary of a Young Girl”, p.136, GENERAL PRESS

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• The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn't. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.

  Yehuda Bauer

  Bystanders, May, Horror

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• I had to help them. There was no choice.

  Oskar Schindler

  Choices, Helping

  Interview at Am Hauptbahn No. 4 in Frankfurt Am Main, West Germany, 1964.

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• 

  There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

  Elie Wiesel

  Freedom, Philosophy, Military

  Elie Wiesel (2011). “From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences”, p.182, Schocken

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• In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.

  Anne Frank

  Motivational, Believe, Divorce

  FaceBook post by Anne Frank from Apr 07, 2015

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• The smell of death overwhelmed us even before we passed through the stockade. More than 3200 naked, emaciated bodies had been flung into shallow graves. Others lay in the streets where they had fallen. ... Eisenhower's face whitened into a mask. Patton walked over to a corner and sickened. I was too revolted to speak. For here death had been so fouled by degradation that it both stunned and numbed us.

  Omar N. Bradley

  Smell, Naked, Degradation

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• The Holocaust was the most evil crime ever committed.

  Stephen Ambrose

  Evil, Crime, Genocide

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• The Holocaust is a sacred subject. One should take off one's shoes when entering its domain, one should tremble each time one pronounces the word.

  Elie Wiesel

  Shoes, Entering, Sacred

  Elie Wiesel, Robert Franciosi (2002). “Elie Wiesel: Conversations”, p.53, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Consider why Germany, fighting a war on two fronts, desperate for fuel and materiel of every sort, would bother to load millions of Jews on railroad cars and transport them hundreds, even thousands, of miles to concentration camps. Camps built specifically to house them, where they would be fed, clothed, even tattooed so they could be inventoried...just to kill them.

  Edgar Steele

  War, Fighting, Two

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• 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

  Religious, Inhumanity To Man, Tolerance

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  Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

  Elie Wiesel

  Bystanders, Remembrance, Silence

  Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, Norway, 11 Dec. 1986

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• Auschwitz cries out with the pain of immense suffering and pleads for a future of respect, peace and encounter among peoples.

  Pope Francis

  Respect, Peace, Pain

  Pope Francis‏ @Pontifex, twitter.com. January 27, 2015.

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• I come from a people who gave the Ten Commandments to the world. Time has come to strenghten them by three additional ones, which we ought to adopt and commit ourselves to: thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.

  Yehuda Bauer

  Inspirational, Time, Bystanders

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• I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear.

  Hans Frank

  Criminals, Asking, Lawyer

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• Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

  Elie Wiesel

  Dream, Night, Dust

  Night ch. 3 (1960)

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• Now in the light of past and present events the bitter truth must be spoken. We feared too little and we hoped too much. We underestimated the bestiality of the enemy; we overestimtaed the humanity, the wisdom, the sense of justice of our friends.

  Chaim Weizmann

  Past, Light, Justice

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• I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.

  Elie Wiesel

  Bystanders, Remembrance, Silence

  Elie Wiesel (2012). “Night”, p.141, Macmillan

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• I'm not alive. People believe memories grow vague, are erased by time, since nothing endures against the passage of time. That's the difference; time does not pass over me, over us. It doesn't erase anything, doesn't undo it. I'm not a live. I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it.

  Charlotte Delbo

  Memories, Believe, Differences

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• Holocaust Memorial Day is intended as an inclusive commemoration of all the individuals and communities who suffered as a result of the Holocaust - not only Jews, but also Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, political prisoners and dozens of ethnic and other minorities.

  Jack Straw

  Memorial Day, Community, Political

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