Mary Gaitskill Quotes

I've been inside the Anne Frank house. You've only read about Anne Frank in grade school. I've been in it. I've seen the diary. Things that teachers couldn't teach you.

Sure I do a lot of jokes about Anne Frank. But when you do those jokes, it makes people remember what happened to her. That process of bringing her story back doesn't have to be a serious one. What I say is all nonsense, but it helps to keep her memory alive.

Like a lot of people, I read 'The Diary of Anne Frank' again and again and again when I was growing up - I'm still completely felled by what an astounding book it is. And as a teenager, I did a lot of reading about concentration camps and the vast horrors of the war.

When I first read Anne Frank's 'Diary of a Young Girl,' I saw for the first time that a girl could be a writer and that it had something to do with survival and with ethics and fighting against evil. I admired her, though her diary remained terrifying and mysterious to me. She was a character in a real fairy tale - fairy tales are brutal.

Every show you do, you have to do research, and I love to dig into things. I learned about World War II by doing 'Anne Frank.'

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

I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I'd have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank.

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.

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

'The Diary of Anne Frank' gets pretty dark toward the end. But there are some comic moments in the early part of the play. Anne was a goofball at times.

My family is very excited about me doing Anne Frank.

It seemed ironic that Lowell Levine and I, who were both Jewish, were going over to identify the remains of a man who was so anti-Semitic.

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

Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp.

The Holocaust was the most evil crime ever committed.

I can't really remember a time in my life when I didn't know something about what we call the Holocaust. It was this dark topic that I would know more about when I got older, but which was spoken about in hushed tones.

If you're fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and you're a Jew, you don't think so much about relationships. People didn't have a lot of divorces during the Holocaust, for instance.

The Internet has been this miraculous conduit to the undeniable truth to the Holocaust.

If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail.

There were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on.

The early years of my life were very, very traumatic. It was scary, because any child knew that death was sort of lurking around Europe as far as Jews were concerned.

I learned a great deal doing Brooklyn Bridge. I was able to take a giant step into the terrible reality that was then. We saw the cattle cars that took folks away. Just knowing it was real, it would be impossible not to feel.

Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.

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

It's in the history books, the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.