Holocaust Survivors Quotes

The hopes of Europe's six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked, 'Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?' I replied, 'No'....From the depths of the tragedy I want to save two million young people...The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They were dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world...Only the branch of the young shall survive...They have to accept it.

I was not raised a Zionist, but a socialist, as were most Jews before the Holocaust.

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.

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

My original interest in the Nazi holocaust was personal. Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.

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.

Churchill was a brilliant and inspiring rhetorician, but one of the first things he did as the head of the British nation was to put German Jews in jail. Tens of thousands of Jews - who had just been fortunate enough to get out from under Hitler only a few years before - spent the entire war in jail.

I certainly felt I had an idea of World War II, and it's probably the idea that many people share: there was this insane aggressor, and there was really only one way to proceed in resisting him. What I didn't realize is that there were many voices belonging to reasonable, interesting, complicated people who had a different way of interpreting the possible responses to the Hitlerian menace.

The whole intention of the Swiss is to use 50 percent to reimburse certain Swiss nationals who, in their lucrative dealings with the Nazis, were finally stuck with some bad accounts because the Nazi's lost the war. The proposal places the profit of those who dealt with the Nazis above the rights of those who were robbed and despoiled by the Germans.

I heard about the Holocaust before hearing the 'Cinderella' story or watching 'Peter Pan.'

All those - or most of those - who went through the experience during the Second World War - they want to remember more - more and more. It's never enough because we feel that we have to tell the story. And no one can tell the story fully.

Holocaust survivors came to Israel in order to establish a new human society where nobody would be able to hurt them just because they're Jewish. This is both a furious and vulnerable message.

I've met many Holocaust survivors who find the era infinitely compelling because they have this deep hunger to understand how it all could possibly have happened.

The Holocaust story has been told and retold so many times.

Combine a left-leaning upbringing with a family with direct experience of the Holocaust and someone with aspirations to write and I guess, sooner or later, that person will have a stab at writing something about the Holocaust.

Did you ever notice how many survivors they have? Did you ever notice that? Everybody - every time you turn around, 15,000 survivors meet here, 400 survivors convention there. I mean, did you ever notice? Nazis sure were inefficient, weren't they? Boy, boy, boy! ...You almost have no survivors that ever say they saw a gas chamber or saw the workings of a gas chamber...they'll say these preposterous stories that anybody can check out to be a lie, an absolute lie.

You can't portray wartime Shanghai without writing about the Holocaust - about 25,000 Jews survived the Nazi death machine by taking refuge there.

My mom, Irmelin, taught me the value of life. Her own life was saved by my grandmother during World War II.

There is no way a non-Jew could say what I did in 'The Holocaust Industry' without being labelled a Holocaust denier. I am labelled a Holocaust denier, too.

To me, the Holocaust stands alone as the most horrible human event in modern civilization.

When somebody says that six million people died in the Holocaust, there is nobody in the world who can understand that. It's only through story, reading books by Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, that you really begin to understand the trauma and how horrible it actually was.

If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.

My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.

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

There's nothing better than to be rootless cosmopolitans who seamlessly merge into whatever society. That's the greatest thing human beings can aspire to. Whether forced by duress, Jews became perfect modern human beings. After the Holocaust, one doesn't really mourn for that - it's too disturbing, seems like a mistake.