Jewish Refugees Quotes

The Jews who have arrived would nearly all like to remain here.

In the late '80s, the U.S.S.R. loosened its restrictions on immigration. When the government was like, 'Y'all wanna bounce?' my family, along with tens of thousands of other Jews ran for the door in an attempt to make a better life in America.

It seems unavoidable that history will always link the reestablishment of the State of Israel with the tragedy of the Holocaust.

Clearly the anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930s went overboard and it was clearly a terrible moment in 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.

The Holocaust only emerged in American life after Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day war against its Arab neighbours.

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

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.

If you want to do something for the Jews, why not give them a good part of Germany?

I'm not particularly fond of Shoah jokes, yet there is one I cannot forget: Why was Auschwitz an optimistic place? Because all the pessimists were already in New York by then.

As a post-Holocaust kid, growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of Jewish refugees, I had got the idea there were no Jews left in Europe. But I found in my European wanderings that many of them had gone back and rebuilt their lives.

My mother was really involved with the Refusenik campaign with Soviet Union Jews. They would come and stay at our house, some of them, after they managed to get out of the Soviet Union at the time. There were things that were Jewish-related happening in my house quite consistently, but it was much more from a kind of activist standpoint.

As a boy I stood at the doorway of our hiding place in Budapest and watched Russian troops fight house by house to liberate the city and therefore rescue us from certain death.

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

The reason that 75% of the Jews in France survived is that the French people helped us.

Hitler had this deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs.

A 1998 study was done in Hebrew by an Israeli scholar, Yosef Grodzinsky, and the English translation of the title is Good Human Material. That's what they wanted sent to Palestine for colonization and for the eventual conflict that took place some years later. These policies were somewhat complementary to the U.S. policy of pressuring England to allow Jews to go to Palestine, but not allowing them here. The British politician Ernest Bevin was quite bitter about it, asking, "if you want to save the Jews, why send them to Palestine when you don't admit them?"

We let 50,000 Jewish intellectuals get across the border. Just as I wanted Lebensraum for Germany, I thought Jews should have a Lebensraum for themselves--outside of Germany.

It's a lesser-known story, but the Japanese government (after the Russian-Nazi pact, which split Poland) did allow Polish Jews to come to Japan, with the expectation that they would then be sent to the United States. But they weren't accepted, so they stayed in Japan.

There's an interesting book called The Fugu Plan, written by Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, which describes the circumstances when European Jews came to Japan, a semi-feudal society.

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

I am one who shows great respect and commends the Cuban people for having the guts to go over to Cuba to get Cubans out when they had the opportunity to do it. I think it's a... shame that the Jews here in the United States in the 1930s didn't do the same for other Jews who were also in trouble.

A Jew who converted, who simulated, was, at least in some periods, safe. Hitler in the beginning did not want to kill all the Jews but he wanted us to have a Germany free of Jews. If America had allowed Jews to come in, the British had accepted Jews from Palestine, they were safe.

The Zionists'...main preoccupation is not to save Jews alive out of Europe but to get Jews into Palestine.

Most of the Jewish refugees, stripped of their considerable possessions, came to Israel. They were welcomed by the Jewish state. They were given shelter and support, and they were integrated into Israeli society together with half a million survivors of the European Holocaust.