William Styron Quotes

The Nazi gas chambers are but a detail of history

The Holocaust was the most evil crime ever committed.

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

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

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

Only one and half million Jews died in the Holocaust.

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.

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've said before that I am not a historian and that when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust, it is the historians that should reflect on it.

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

Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.

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

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.

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...

The killing of the Jews made the war monstrous.

This war would be only a partial success if the whole lot of Jewry survived it, while we shed our best blood to save Europe. My attitude toward the Jews will therefore be based solely on the expectation that they must disappear. They must be done away with. Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible.

The persecution of Jews in occupied Poland meant that we could see horror emerging gradually in many ways. In 1939, they were forced to wear Jewish stars, and people were herded and shut up into ghettos. Then, in the years '41 and '42 there was plenty of public evidence of pure sadism. With people behaving like pigs, I felt the Jews were being destroyed. I had to help them. There was no choice.

The Holocaust remains unique in contemporary Jewish consciousness for its capacity to engender the most visceral grief and abject pain.

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

The Holocaust is as real a historical event as World War II itself and not to be challenged.

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 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.

To me, the Holocaust stands alone as the most horrible human event in modern civilization.

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.