Eugene Jarecki Quotes

My grandparents got out of Poland right before the Holocaust and came here, and the only thing that mattered was surviving.

My grandmother - my mother's mother - was a German Jewish refugee, an only child who came here from Berlin in 1936 at the age of 17.

I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the South Shore of Long Island, a product of the early -wentieth-century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York City and its environs.

My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn't have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments.

I'm of that generation of Jews still deeply influenced by the Holocaust. Certainly the notion that the state power to kill can be subject to such extraordinary abuse is always lurking beneath the surface for me. Certainly my experience and identity as a Jew is there.

I have never found out that there was in my family an artist or anyone interested in the arts or sciences, and I have never been sufficiently interested in my 'family tree' to bother. My father and mother had come to America on one of those great waves of immigration that followed persecution and pogroms in Czarist Russia and Poland.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

My grandfather was facing this terror, my parents, myself.

The German mass murder of the Jews... brought my Jewishness to the surface.

My grandparents and great-grandparents were classic East European/Russian Jewry. Quasky was the name until Grandpa Quasky changed it in 1948.

My Aunt Erna was smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1939, alive, in a coffin with a spider plant at her feet. When I moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 1974 for 'Happy Days,' I took a cutting with me.

Looking back now, I can see that my dad was a real fighter. A lot of people thought, 'Why don't you keep the Jewish stuff quiet?' They were anti-Semitic Jews. People who were afraid. People who came here and made it and anglicized themselves and didn't want to associate with their past.

My grandfather arrived in Houston in 1942 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. He had lost everything - his profession, his language, his money - but the city welcomed him, as it has hundreds of thousands of immigrants over the years.

I saw the most frightening, most depressing sight I had ever seen - a row of stores with Stars of David and the word 'Jude' painted on them, and inside, behind half-empty counters, people in a daze, cringing like they didn't know what hit them and didn't know where the next blow would come from. Hitler had been in power only six months, and his boycott was already in full effect. I hadn't been so wholly conscious of being a Jew since my bar mitzvahs, and it was the first time since I'd had the measles that I was too sick to eat.

Being Jewish has always been important to me. I now have 6M tattooed on the inside of my left arm. It's only a half-inch, but every time anyone sees it, they're reminded of the six million who perished, and so am I.

Here in Spain, there are Argentine Jews, children and grandchildren of immigrants of Jews who fled Germany or Austria in the thirties, and in the seventies during the dictatorship, they had to go into exile again.

My father was second-generation Chinese-American, born in 1923 in California. My mother emigrated to the States from China when she was in her early twenties, in part to escape the political turmoil in China.

In my blood there is no Jewish blood. In their callous rage, all anti-Semites must hate me now as a Jew. For that reason I am a true Russian.

Combine a left-leaning upbringing with a family with direct experience of the Holocaust and someone with aspirations to write and I guess, sooner or later, that person will have a stab at writing something about the Holocaust.

I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.

I came to a happy Jewish family in dark days in Europe.

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.

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.'

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.

You could be a victim, you could be a hero, you could be a villain, or you could be a fugitive. But you could not just stand by. If you were in Europe between 1933 and 1945, you had to be something.