Imre Kertesz Quotes

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

I can't really remember a time in my life when I didn't know something about what we call the Holocaust. It was this dark topic that I would know more about when I got older, but which was spoken about in hushed tones.

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.

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.

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.

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

I have a ton of Holocaust stuff, and some of it is really hard core.

I'm of that generation of Jews still deeply influenced by the Holocaust. Certainly the notion that the state power to kill can be subject to such extraordinary abuse is always lurking beneath the surface for me. Certainly my experience and identity as a Jew is there.

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.

The Holocaust, taken by itself, is a black hole. To look at it directly is to be swallowed up by it.

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.

Roman's wife Sharon Tate had been murdered by Charles Manson the year before, but Roman had been through so much leaving the Warsaw ghetto that he was very strong and private.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

The Holocaust survivors are among the most inspiring people I have had the privilege to meet.

I have not changed my opinion that the Holocaust is a trauma of European civilization.

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.

That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views.

The question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans.

No one will ever understand Auschwitz.

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

My grandfather was facing this terror, my parents, myself.

My grandparents got out of Poland right before the Holocaust and came here, and the only thing that mattered was surviving.

The truth about the Holocaust must not die.

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.

I'm the son of two Holocaust survivors. As a child, I heard from one of my parents' best friends about living through Mengele's infamous selection process at Auschwitz. He haunted my nightmares.