Elie Wiesel Quotes

So they didn't let anybody else off. I can't live like this, I'm finished. Auschwitz was easy.

Murder has been done in Buchenwald.

It is certain that concentration camps had a bad reputation with us.

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 have recurring nightmares about being in a Nazi concentration camp with all my family and constantly being sent to solitary confinement.

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.

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.

When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it's again not people who are intrinsically evil.

For us, genocide was the gas chamber - what happened in Germany. We were not able to realize that with the machete you can create a genocide.

The Supreme Court of the United States... has validated the Nazi method of execution in... concentration camps, starving them to death.

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.

The end was surely near. The Nazis killed you only when you were naked, because they knew, psychologically, that naked people never resist.

To look upon the massacre of our fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers, and if we speak we are called savages ….

The danger that the massacres will surely ruin your state the same as it has destroyed those innocent Jewish victims, rather deepens my regret that you have till now not succeeded in suppressing fully the excesses

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

The brutality of apartheid drains you of that emotion of fear if you have gone through everything you can be put through in the process of harassment.

The hatred and contempt for men, women and children that was manifested in the Shoah was a crime against God and against humanity.

When you grow up Jewish, you are exposed at a very young age to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism and its extreme manifestation in the Holocaust. I spent a lot of time as a little kid wondering how something like that could happen.

The forces of violence and oppression don't care about the innocent.

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.

At the end of the day, with all due respect, the Jews are the ultimate victims of the twentieth century.

Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.

There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.

Many years later, after Niemöller had been imprisoned for eight years in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler, he penned these infamous words: First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionist, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew. And then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.

Summer came. For the book thief, everything was going nicely. For me, the sky was the color of Jews. When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. When their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some cases were nailed into it by the sheer force of desperation, their spirits came toward me, into my arms, and we climbed out of those shower facilities, onto the roof and up, into eternity's certain breadth. They just kept feeding me. Minute after minute. Shower after shower.