Elie Wiesel Quotes

I will never forget the moment when Peter van Pels and I saw a group of selected men. Among those men was Peter's father. The men were marched away. Two hours later, a lorry came by, loaded with their clothing.

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

Life is like a concentration camp... you can't leave without dying.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to life as long as God himself

There is no answer to Auschwitz...To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.

Cursing themselves in ragged dreamsfire has singed the edges of,they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.Shimmering fans work against the heat& smell of gunpowder, making moneyfloat from hand to hand. The next momenta rocket pushes a white fistthrough night sky, & they scatter like birds& fall into the shape their liveshave become.

Life is a concentration camp. You're stuck here and there's no way out and you can only rage impotently against your persecutors.

We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything--death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.

It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion.

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.

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.

All of a sudden their husband's dead and maybe a child is dead and they have absolutely nothing - and they're heading through the desert at night.

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

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

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

My mother had a horrific life. At fourteen, she was in the Nazi concentration camps. Her sense about life now is, every day above ground is a good day.

The swimmer adrift on the open seas measures his strength, and strives with all his muscles to keep himself afloat. But what is he to do when there is no land on the horizon, and none beyond it?

It's what the Iraqi people are going through right now. They have encountered a victorious, hostile force-but, you know, there they still are. There their culture is, there their history is, they're not going anywhere.

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's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.

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

I was born in a tiny little enclave of terrified Jewish refugees, less than half a million of them, with no clear perspective of a future - hopes, yes, but no clear perspective.

Things happen in 'If This is a Man' that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in 'King Lear', or Conrad in 'The Heart of Darkness'.