Shawn Crahan Quotes

Anne Frank's diary made a very big impression on me at age 12 or so.

Sure I do a lot of jokes about Anne Frank. But when you do those jokes, it makes people remember what happened to her. That process of bringing her story back doesn't have to be a serious one. What I say is all nonsense, but it helps to keep her memory alive.

When I first read Anne Frank's 'Diary of a Young Girl,' I saw for the first time that a girl could be a writer and that it had something to do with survival and with ethics and fighting against evil. I admired her, though her diary remained terrifying and mysterious to me. She was a character in a real fairy tale - fairy tales are brutal.

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.

I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I'd have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank.

To see the faces and hear the voices of victims of the Holocaust - one of the darkest chapters in history - was an experience I will never forget.

So many times I wanted to go to Auschwitz, but I couldn't take up the courage to go there.

Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp.

I can't really remember a time in my life when I didn't know something about what we call the Holocaust. It was this dark topic that I would know more about when I got older, but which was spoken about in hushed tones.

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.

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.

It's in the history books, the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

I have a ton of Holocaust stuff, and some of it is really hard core.

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

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.

The Holocaust, taken by itself, is a black hole. To look at it directly is to be swallowed up by it.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

Roman's wife Sharon Tate had been murdered by Charles Manson the year before, but Roman had been through so much leaving the Warsaw ghetto that he was very strong and private.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

I have not changed my opinion that the Holocaust is a trauma of European civilization.

My father was born in Amsterdam in a highly religious family. He was in Amsterdam, and he went into hiding right near where Anne Frank was. He was a theoretical physicist and the last Jew to get a Ph.D. in Amsterdam.

Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.

No one will ever understand Auschwitz.

In many ways, my life has begun before I was born. It began in the moment my mother Malka walked out of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.