Elie Wiesel Quotes

I make a difference between genocide and Holocaust. Holocaust was mainly Jewish, that was the only people, to the last Jew, sentenced to die for one reason, for being Jewish, that's all. Genocide is something else. Genocide has been actually codified by the United Nations. It's the intent of killing, the intent of killing people, a community in this culture so forth, but no other people has been really interested.

What is the difference between burning and gassing people in ovens and doing it to a whole nation out in the open?

I did not feel justified in exterminating the Jewish men and leaving the women and children alive to avenge them.

Exactly the same as we behaved against the Jews, we now wish to do against all other people who are in our way, to smash, crush - yes, even exterminate.

Nothing can be achieved without sacrificing blood. The Jews will meet their end at our hands

Marched into Russia. Killed the Jews. Strangled the women. Murdered the children. Everyone knows what we bring.

They are shooting Jews in masses. These crimes must not be allowed to continue..

Since the conquest of Poland, 300,000 Jews in this land have been murdered in the most bestial manner. The German people are again sleeping on in obtuse, stupid sleep giving these fascist criminals the temerity and opportunity to continue to rage—and they are doing it…. Everyone is guilty, guilty, guilty!

The stench of human wreckage in which the Nazi regime finally sank down to defeat has been the most shocking fact of modern times.

How did [the Holocaust] happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, 'My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.'

They used to draw cartoons of Jews in Germany. Later they started killing them in the Holocaust.

I have given orders to my Death units to exterminate without mercy or pity men, women and children belonging to the Polish speaking race... After all, who remembers today the extermination of the Armenians?

The [concentration camps] were swarming with photographers and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect. Now, for a short day, everyone will see what happened to those poor devils in those camps; tomorrow, very few will care what happens to them in the future.

Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history.

[Nazi] copied stuff from us for their "final solution" but we get to walk around like we're the good guys.

Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.

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

I became interested in genocide, because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians and after the Armenians, Hitler took action.

We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered too. And then a lot of other people, usually.

I want to remind people that the Nazis weren't able to take the Jews to the crematoriums immediately. The German people wouldn't have allowed for it. Instead, the Nazis had to change public opinion. They marginalized the Jewish people, disparaged them, and made them objects of contempt.

But at the beginning, our definition of the genocide was what happened to Armenia in 1917 or 1919, it's happened to the Jew in Europe, and we were not realizing - In our point of view, they have not the tools to do a genocide.

The Jew is a devil in human form. It is fitting that he be exterminated root and branch.

In 1939, Germany established gun control. From 1939 to 1945, six million Jews and seven million others unable to defend themselves were exterminated.

It is an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.