David Heyman Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The sights I have just seen [at Buchenwald] are so unbelievable that I don't think I'll believe them myself until I've seen the photographs.

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 [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.

Summer came. For the book thief, everything was going nicely. For me, the sky was the color of Jews. When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. When their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some cases were nailed into it by the sheer force of desperation, their spirits came toward me, into my arms, and we climbed out of those shower facilities, onto the roof and up, into eternity's certain breadth. They just kept feeding me. Minute after minute. Shower after shower.

Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these photographs did.

The Holocaust is not only a tragedy of the Jewish people, it is a failure of humanity as a whole.

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.

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

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

But at the beginning, our definition of the genocide was what happened to Armenia in 1917 or 1919, it's happened to the Jew in Europe, and we were not realizing - In our point of view, they have not the tools to do a genocide.

Once genocide is under way, it is unlikely that anything but military force will end the horror.

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

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

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.

It's perfectly understandable and proper for one to be anti-Semite, but to exterminate women and children is so extraordinary, it's hard to believe. No defendant here wanted that.

After she left everything fell apart. No Jew was safe. There were rumors of unfathomable things, and because we couldn't fathom them we failed to believe them, until we had no choice and it was too late. p 8

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.

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