Antonio Tabucchi Quotes

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.

The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.

I have always lived in Amsterdam. During the war, we inhabited the Rivieren neighborhood where many Jews lived at the time. Our downstairs neighbors were Jews, and there were also Jews a few houses from us. We saw how they were rounded up and taken away. That made a very great impression on me.

I didn't realise the depth of horror that happened in the Second World War every day.

There were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on.

I am not saying that during the Second World War Germany did not, under the leadership of the National Socialist government, commit crimes.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

There's something so relentless and foul about Hitler and his people, and the way things progressed from year to year. It just got to me in the strangest way.

The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims.

To those who don't know the historical truth, I would like to say today, Poland was not an aggressor but a victim during the Second World War.

Norway was occupied by the Germans in the Second World War, and I've met a lot of people who had to live through that occupation in varying degrees.

That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views.

What was new in the imperialism of Germany and Japan in World War II was the far more ruthless treatment of subject populations.

The Nazi’s radical anti-Semitism was an attempt to guarantee the complicity of the broadest possible swath of the populace in Nazi crimes. With their hands dripping with blood, most Germans would likely see no real choice but to fight to the death against the allies.

It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present.

I experienced Nazism as a child. Like many of my generation, I was motivated by the desire to prevent another war at any price.

When the Second World War started, I was only five but I still remember... Being a witness... I wanted people to remember what happened in our country and elsewhere.

I've always wondered, how did Hitler get away with so much for so long?

Hitler's Europe Yes, welcome to Hitler's Europe... Come on, human race - for our children's sake if not our own. This is wakey, wakey time.

It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends.

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.

To those who are incapable of presenting the historic truth in an honest way, I want to say that Poland was not a perpetrator but a victim of World War Two.

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.'

I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.

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.