Moshe Katsav Quotes

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history.

What is the difference between burning and gassing people in ovens and doing it to a whole nation out in the open?

The stench of human wreckage in which the Nazi regime finally sank down to defeat has been the most shocking fact of modern times.

How did [the Holocaust] happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, 'My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.'

The Holocaust happened in Europe, and that's important to how it is viewed. Had Europeans done such a thing in the far corners of the earth, rather than on their own doorstep, it might not be mentioned in the history books.

I make a difference between genocide and Holocaust. Holocaust was mainly Jewish, that was the only people, to the last Jew, sentenced to die for one reason, for being Jewish, that's all. Genocide is something else. Genocide has been actually codified by the United Nations. It's the intent of killing, the intent of killing people, a community in this culture so forth, but no other people has been really interested.

I have given orders to my Death units to exterminate without mercy or pity men, women and children belonging to the Polish speaking race... After all, who remembers today the extermination of the Armenians?

I make a difference between genocide and Holocaust. Holocaust was mainly Jewish, that was the only people, to the last Jew, sentenced to die for one reason, for being Jewish, that's all.

The truth is, it's very hard looking back... we look at holocaust now with such knowledge and such a sense of the horror of what it was, that it's hard to believe even now that in 1930s and 1940s, before something like this had happened, that it could be impossible to imagine the extent of this horror.

History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?' She shakes her head. 'All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimination.

The [concentration camps] were swarming with photographers and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect. Now, for a short day, everyone will see what happened to those poor devils in those camps; tomorrow, very few will care what happens to them in the future.

Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.

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

When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed. That was horrifying beyond words, and that's where science - in my opinion, this is just an opinion - that's where science leads you.

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.

Just take Germany and the suffering of Jews during and after the Second World War. It would be legal to ridicule and to laugh at this suffering, but since it was such a trauma on the European conscience, no one is going to do it. It is an open scar, an open wound, an open reality.

Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its spectre still hangs over the world and doesn't allow us to forget.

I became interested in genocide, because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians and after the Armenians, Hitler took action.

But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?

Germany's crimes were recent and of such a scale and depravity that, unless constantly faced, they will come to seem fictitious.

Many people in Hungary acted shamefully during World War II.

Had the Holocaust happened in Tahiti or the Congo, as it has; had it happened in South America, as it has; had it happened in the West Indies, as it has - you must remember that within fifty years of Columbus's arrival, only the bones remained of the people called the Arawaks, with one or two of them in Spain as specimens. Had the Holocaust committed under the Nazis happened somewhere else, we wouldn't be talking about it the way we talk about it.

For most of history, genocide was just something governments did and nobody blinked.

Expulsion and genocide, though both are international offenses, must remain distinct; the former is an offense against fellow-nations, whereas the latter is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the "human status" without which the very words "mankind" or "humanity" would be devoid of meaning.

Genocide, in my opinion - is an attempt by a powerful group completely to eradicate from the face of the Earth the existence of people because of their ethnic makeup or because of their race or religion, and that was the case with Hitler trying to exterminate the Jews, and that was the case in Rwanda, when the Tutsis were attacked and over 500,000 were killed in two or three days.