Kate Bernheimer Quotes

If life is so critical, if Anne Frank could die, if my friend could die, children were as vulnerable as adults, and that gave me a secret purpose to my work, to make them live. Because I wanted to live. I wanted to grow up.

I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I'd have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank.

Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

It's an amazing role for any actor, so deep and challenging. And Anne Frank was such an amazing person, I feel honored to portray her.

We took this challenge before our Lord and our conscience, and it must be done, because this man, Hitler, he is the ultimate evil.

Sure I do a lot of jokes about Anne Frank. But when you do those jokes, it makes people remember what happened to her. That process of bringing her story back doesn't have to be a serious one. What I say is all nonsense, but it helps to keep her memory alive.

Faced with destruction, the Jewish people survived.

That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.

Anne Frank's diary made a very big impression on me at age 12 or so.

If Hitler were to succeed, it would be the end for many besides ourselves of all those things which, as we say, “make life worth living.” We realize that the struggle may cost us everything, but just because the things we are defending are worth any sacrifice, it is a noble privilege to be the defenders of things so precious.

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.

In many ways, my life has begun before I was born. It began in the moment my mother Malka walked out of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

'The Diary of Anne Frank' gets pretty dark toward the end. But there are some comic moments in the early part of the play. Anne was a goofball at times.

I've been inside the Anne Frank house. You've only read about Anne Frank in grade school. I've been in it. I've seen the diary. Things that teachers couldn't teach you.

So many times I wanted to go to Auschwitz, but I couldn't take up the courage to go there.

If you're fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and you're a Jew, you don't think so much about relationships. People didn't have a lot of divorces during the Holocaust, for instance.

I came to a happy Jewish family in dark days in Europe.

The unutterable violence of the Holocaust shook our confidence in the possibility of telling any story of faith at all.

Every show you do, you have to do research, and I love to dig into things. I learned about World War II by doing 'Anne Frank.'

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.

Until I read Anne Frank's diary, I had found books a literal escape from what could be the harsh reality around me. After I read the diary, I had a fresh way of viewing the both literature and the world. From then on, I found I was impatient with books that were not honest or that were trivial and frivolous.

I learned a great deal doing Brooklyn Bridge. I was able to take a giant step into the terrible reality that was then. We saw the cattle cars that took folks away. Just knowing it was real, it would be impossible not to feel.

They said it was against the rules to take sides on a controversial issue. I said, 'I wish you had told me that during World War II, when I took sides against Hitler.'

The stronger you stand on your principles, the easier it is to fight. The first time, it's tough, but the second time, it's always easier. You just have to push for your rights.