Howard Jacobson Quotes

Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.

Auschwitz will forever remain the black hole of the entire human history.

So many times I wanted to go to Auschwitz, but I couldn't take up the courage to go there.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

Sometimes novels are considered 'important' in the way medicine is - they taste terrible and are difficult to get down your throat, but are good for you.

To me, the Holocaust stands alone as the most horrible human event in modern civilization.

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.

I'm not saying that the gas chambers didn't exist. I couldn't see them myself.

I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Anne Frank's diary made a very big impression on me at age 12 or so.

Lies surfaced about Jews being murdered here and there, and the Holocaust. And, of course, they are all lies and unfounded claims. No Chelmno, no Dachau, no Auschwitz! They were disinfection sites...

No one will ever understand Auschwitz.

The persecution of Jews in occupied Poland meant that we could see horror emerging gradually in many ways. In 1939, they were forced to wear Jewish stars, and people were herded and shut up into ghettos. Then, in the years '41 and '42 there was plenty of public evidence of pure sadism. With people behaving like pigs, I felt the Jews were being destroyed. I had to help them. There was no choice.

I'm not particularly fond of Shoah jokes, yet there is one I cannot forget: Why was Auschwitz an optimistic place? Because all the pessimists were already in New York by then.

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.

Only one and half million Jews died in the Holocaust.

I'm the son of two Holocaust survivors. As a child, I heard from one of my parents' best friends about living through Mengele's infamous selection process at Auschwitz. He haunted my nightmares.

In 'The Pianist,' Polanski transformed his ghastly knowledge of the camps into an act of artistic self-expression.

As Polish society we cannot live with the term 'Polish death camps' or 'Polish concentration camps.'

My mother arrived in Brussels in 1938 from a small town near Krakow. But strangely enough, in 1942 or 1943, she was taken back to Auschwitz, which was just 30 miles from where she grew up. Her parents died there and a lot of her family.

I was 15, not 14, when I was inside there [Auschwitz], 15, and for me both were actually a surprise.

The American and the British armies liberated camps, there wasn't a single order of the day: Let's go and liberate the camp. They stumbled upon the camps. Same thing with the Russians, I asked the Colonel who liberated Auschwitz, they didn't, there wasn't a priority. But I feel that that was a mistake, it was a sin because they could have saved so many people and they didn't.

I wanted to say sorry, I wanted to tell her I could not forget the roundup, the camp, Michel's death, and the direct train to Auschwitz that had taken her parents away forever. Sorry for what? he had retaliated, why should I, an American, feel sorry, hadn't my fellow countrymen freed France in June 1944? I had nothing to be sorry for, he laughed. I had looked at him straight in the eyes. Sorry for not knowing. Sorry for being forty-five years old and not knowing.

In Germany, of course, the Holocaust will always be in our history and a big stain on our lives.