Aharon Appelfeld Quotes

The truth about the Holocaust must not die.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Italy, the country where fascism was born, we have a particular relation with the Holocaust, but as a turning point in history it belongs to everybody in the world. It is a part of humanity.

I believe that the Holocaust is the most significant event in human history.

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

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

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

In Germany, of course, the Holocaust will always be in our history and a big stain on our lives.

I could direct a very decent Holocaust film, but I don't have the same experience as a young boy who was rocked to sleep in the lap of a grandmother who had a tattooed number on her arm, who told him stories of the people who disappeared, the relatives she never saw again, as he drifted off with his cheek nestled next to that number.

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

I've been to Dachau.

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

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.

Even post-WWII, nobody talked about the Holocaust. It wasn't until the '50s that people started talking about it.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century.

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.

It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

We licked the race haters in Europe, but the millions of Jewish dead cannot be restored to life

No one will ever understand Auschwitz.