Markus Zusak Quotes

Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane.

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.

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.

You could be a victim, you could be a hero, you could be a villain, or you could be a fugitive. But you could not just stand by. If you were in Europe between 1933 and 1945, you had to be something.

Our house was in the middle of town; behind it was the ghetto, from which Jews were sent to concentration camps.

It seemed ironic that Lowell Levine and I, who were both Jewish, were going over to identify the remains of a man who was so anti-Semitic.

I came to a happy Jewish family in dark days in Europe.

In taking action we must remember that the things which are happening to the Jews today are but a part of the general disintegration anticipated by philosophers and historians of different schools for almost half a century.

I read a lot of history. The passive Jews in Germany didn't survive. The smart ones got out.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

In 1939, Germany established gun control. From 1939 to 1945, six million Jews and seven million others unable to defend themselves were exterminated.

The reason that 75% of the Jews in France survived is that the French people helped us.

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 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.

Since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is no longer respectable. It was in the 1920s and '30s, but the Holocaust obviously changed that.

You don't always get what you wish for. Especially in Nazi Germany

The Holocaust was the most evil crime ever committed.

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.

The Internet has been this miraculous conduit to the undeniable truth to the Holocaust.

We, of course, have the power of hindsight in our arsenal, but people living in Berlin in that era didn't. What would that have been like as this darkness fell over Germany?

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 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 want to remind people that the Nazis weren't able to take the Jews to the crematoriums immediately. The German people wouldn't have allowed for it. Instead, the Nazis had to change public opinion. They marginalized the Jewish people, disparaged them, and made them objects of contempt.

Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.