Alan Furst Quotes

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.

Hitler's Europe Yes, welcome to Hitler's Europe... Come on, human race - for our children's sake if not our own. This is wakey, wakey time.

We cannot calculate the numbers of people who left, fled or were fished out of Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.

I read a lot of history. The passive Jews in Germany didn't survive. The smart ones got out.

I'm obsessed with history, especially WWII and the Jews in Europe during the Holocaust.

Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

The Nazi’s radical anti-Semitism was an attempt to guarantee the complicity of the broadest possible swath of the populace in Nazi crimes. With their hands dripping with blood, most Germans would likely see no real choice but to fight to the death against the allies.

After May 1940, the good times were few and far between; first there was the war, then the capitulation, and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews.

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

We, in America and Great Britain, have never had to live with evil and ignore it, or pretend it wasn't happening, as people did all over Europe, and indeed, even in Germany herself.

Since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is no longer respectable. It was in the 1920s and '30s, but the Holocaust obviously changed that.

Our house was in the middle of town; behind it was the ghetto, from which Jews were sent to concentration camps.

She was a Jew feeder without a question in the world on that man's first night in Molching. She was an arm reacher, deep into a mattress, to deliver a sketchbook to a teenage girl. (84.25)

At the end of the day, with all due respect, the Jews are the ultimate victims of the twentieth century.

It seemed ironic that Lowell Levine and I, who were both Jewish, were going over to identify the remains of a man who was so anti-Semitic.

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.

To those who are incapable of presenting the historic truth in an honest way, I want to say that Poland was not a perpetrator but a victim of World War Two.

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.'

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.

Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.

Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.

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