Markus Zusak Quotes

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.

The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.

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.

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 killing of the Jews made the war monstrous.

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

They are shooting Jews in masses. These crimes must not be allowed to continue..

The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

Short shrift is made of the Jews in all eastern occupied areas. Tens of thousands of them are liquidated.

It was a total and absolute surprise to find out that what was inside the concentration camps was a sea of skeletons. What is clear to me, therefore, is that while the tragedy of war grinds on, the contemporary aesthetics of the tragedy seem not only confused but, in some way, suspicious.

Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

What happened to the Jews cannot be compared with all the other crimes. Every Jew had a death sentence without a date.

Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.

The Holocaust is the most documented tragedy in recorded history. And therefore, later on, if there will be a later on, anyone wishing to know will know where to go for knowledge.

I remember learning about the Holocaust when I was in kindergarten and being terrified. I think we even watched a graphic video about it in Jewish day school. Although I was quite young, I remember making these vows to myself such as, I'm never going to love my country so much that I can't leave in a moment's notice.

As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.

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

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

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.

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.

In the concentration camps, we discovered this whole universe where everyone had his place. The killer came to kill, and the victims came to die.

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

Murder has been done in Buchenwald.

The greatest and the most horrible crime that has ever been committed in the history of the whole world.