Krzysztof Penderecki Quotes

I was born in the Second World War during the Nazi invasion of my country.

If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail.

I am not saying that Hitler was a choir boy. But I am saying, let him who was innocent in the Second World War cast the first stone.

The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.

The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims.

I have left too many white crosses across north Africa, Italy, and France, and I’ve seen too many young men wounded and maimed not to be in complete sympathy with any policy that designs to eradicate, root and branch, the evil force, Nazism, that loose this holocaust on the world.

Without the railways, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened. I don't actually think the second world war would have happened without them.

I am not saying that during the Second World War Germany did not, under the leadership of the National Socialist government, commit crimes.

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.'

It's in the history books, the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

Born in 1936, I experienced the Second World War as a child in the city of Gelsenkirchen-Buer. This area was heavily bombed, but fortunately, all members of my family survived the war and post-war period.

When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.

Most people learn all about the Second World War in school, or else, they see so many films put out by Hollywood, that it's easy to think we know exactly what happened.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

As a Jew, there's a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust, too. It's amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There's a need to make these films and reiterate it happened.

I can say that we are very clear in our mind about the responsibility of the national soldiers for the break with civilisation that was the Shoah. We are firmly convinced that this is something that will have to be handed over to generations to come... so we don't see any reason to change our view of history.

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

I studied history at university, so I'm always quite fascinated by the Second World War and France. That's one of my interests.

I experienced Nazism as a child. Like many of my generation, I was motivated by the desire to prevent another war at any price.

The truth about the Holocaust must not die.

Hungary has a moral debt to the Jews that it helped send to death camps thirty years after the First World War.

To see the faces and hear the voices of victims of the Holocaust - one of the darkest chapters in history - was an experience I will never forget.

Germany remains among the few countries in Europe to acknowledge, officially and nationally, its responsibility for the crimes it led against our people.

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

I have just written a book on the occupation of the Channel Islands, which is being published in Germany. Pursuing the Second World War is my passion because it's the most extraordinary period in history.