Yann Martel Quotes

Sixty years after the end of the war, the time has come to make this information available. With the number of survivors and witnesses diminishing by the day, and the reality that the Holocaust is fading into the pages of history and memory, we should not have to wait any longer.

As the generation of Holocaust survivors and liberators dwindles, the torch of remembrance, of bearing witness, and of education must continue forward.

It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.

But we cannot rely on memorials and museums alone. We can tell ourselves we will never forget and we likely won't. But we need to make sure that we teach history to those who never had the opportunity to remember in the first place.

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

I think people in general have neglected to learn about history.

There's no relationship to the narrative anymore. People want their own interpretation of history. We're compartmentalizing, forgetting what came directly before, like it's not a big deal. That, to me, is a crime.

Most of us get our history through story.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

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.

I was probably unusually close to my parents, so I do what I can now to preserve the integrity of their memory. The Holocaust deserves to be remembered.

When you revise history, you lose it.

If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.

The events of the time may be transmitted to posterity; but the agitation of the public mind can never be fully comprehended but by those who were witnesses of it

I've met many Holocaust survivors who find the era infinitely compelling because they have this deep hunger to understand how it all could possibly have happened.

I don't think it's such a bad idea that people learn the same history in school. I think it tends to ground people and give them something to respond to and react against.

Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened.

Memory in America suffers amnesia.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness. Not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are responsible for what we do with those memories