Howard Jacobson Quotes

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

So they didn't let anybody else off. I can't live like this, I'm finished. Auschwitz was easy.

We will not return No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz

No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.

I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

I was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didn't bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn't know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection.

Murder has been done in Buchenwald.

I still carry the marks on my body of what those "German supermen" did to me then. I was sentenced to death.

Auschwitz will forever remain the black hole of the entire human history.

. . .only the victims and survivors can truly comprehend the awfulness of that time and place; the rest of us live on the other side of the fence, staring through from our own comfortable place, trying in our own clumsy ways to make sense of it all.

Auschwitz exists because of politicized science.

But there's something about the simplicity of Auschwitz... there's just nothing. There's just photographs, there's a room full of limbs, a room full of hair, and then you go into the place where the gas chambers were. You walk down these halls and the efficiency of it is so inhuman. The place is so powerful, just for its utter bald, bare simplicity.

Furthermore, they were constantly informed by all the camp authorities that they had been abandoned by the world: they were beggars and lucky to receive the daily soup of starvation.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

During the first 3 years at Auschwitz, 2 million people died; over the next 2 years - 3 million.

In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.

What I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history.

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.

Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.

The end was surely near. The Nazis killed you only when you were naked, because they knew, psychologically, that naked people never resist.

Please report to RF SS and to the Fuehrer that all arrangements against Jews, political and concentration camp internees in the Protectorate have been taken care of by me personally today.

When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.

I have never been a victim of antisemitism - if you put to one side my war-time experience. That said, I am lucky not to have been sent into a concentration camp.

I have recurring nightmares about being in a Nazi concentration camp with all my family and constantly being sent to solitary confinement.

I didn't realise the depth of horror that happened in the Second World War every day.