Elie Wiesel Quotes

I was born into an Irish Catholic family in the New York area in this great, wonderful, and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me, and it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith. How could such a thing be? How is that consistent with the concept of a loving God?

I will never forget the moment when Peter van Pels and I saw a group of selected men. Among those men was Peter's father. The men were marched away. Two hours later, a lorry came by, loaded with their clothing.

Now do I begin to be a disciple of Christ, and care for nothing in this world, that so I may find Jesus. Let fire, or the cross, or wild beasts, or the breaking of my bones, or the cutting of me to pieces, or the shattering of my whole body, yea, all the tortures of the devil - let them all come upon me, only let me enjoy my God.

Let fire and the cross; let the crowds of wild beasts; let tearings ... let shatterings of the whole body; and let all the evil torments of the devil come upon me: only let me attain to Jesus Christ.

May nothing entice me till I happily make my way to Jesus Christ! Fire, cross, struggles with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs - let them come to me, provided only I make my way to Jesus Christ.

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.

Eighteen months before I was born, my mother was in Auschwitz. She weighed 49 pounds. She always told me that God saved her so she could give me life. I was born out of nothing.

When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.

Persecutions are inevitable as a Christian. We are not greater than our Master, Jesus Christ, in whose Holy Spirit we gain strength to endure.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction.

That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.

In the concentration camps, we discovered this whole universe where everyone had his place. The killer came to kill, and the victims came to die.

I still carry the marks on my body of what those "German supermen" did to me then. I was sentenced to death.

The Holocaust remains unique in contemporary Jewish consciousness for its capacity to engender the most visceral grief and abject pain.

Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

So much of Judaism is about suffering, survival, and pathos.

I've been to Dachau.

The children of God all have a cross to bear. A suffering Savior generally has suffering disciples.

The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

I have lost my mother, my father, my five, and ninety relatives in Poland. Poland is for me a cemetery.

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.

Jesus Christ was the most perfect being to ever walk this planet and he was persecuted and nailed to the cross … so please don’t be surprised when we get a little static.

Weak Christians are afraid of the shadow of the cross.

Persecution has come upon us, right honorable brethren, and persecution in the severest form. Shepherds are persecuted that their flocks may be scattered. And the worst of all is that those who are being treated ill cannot accept their sufferings in proof of their testimony, nor can the people reverence the athletes as in the army of martyrs, because the name of Christians is applied to the persecutors. The one charge which is now sure to secure severe punishment is the careful keeping of the traditions of the Fathers.