Viktor E. Frankl Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Faced with destruction, the Jewish people survived.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

What I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history.

The Holocaust survivors are among the most inspiring people I have had the privilege to meet.

No one will ever understand Auschwitz.

Auschwitz will forever remain the black hole of the entire human history.

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

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.

The Holocaust was the most evil crime ever committed.

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.

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.

Auschwitz speaks against even a right to self-determination that is enjoyed by all other peoples because one of the preconditions for the horror, besides other, older urges, was a strong and united Germany.

I'm not saying that the gas chambers didn't exist. I couldn't see them myself.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

My mother had a horrific life. At fourteen, she was in the Nazi concentration camps. Her sense about life now is, every day above ground is a good day.

What I'm trying to say is the Holocaust was a horrific crime against humanity and frankly, I would never want to see that repeated.

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.

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.

Lies surfaced about Jews being murdered here and there, and the Holocaust. And, of course, they are all lies and unfounded claims. No Chelmno, no Dachau, no Auschwitz! They were disinfection sites...