Survivor Stories Quotes

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

I could direct a very decent Holocaust film, but I don't have the same experience as a young boy who was rocked to sleep in the lap of a grandmother who had a tattooed number on her arm, who told him stories of the people who disappeared, the relatives she never saw again, as he drifted off with his cheek nestled next to that number.

War is not a computer-generated missile striking a digital map. War is the color of earth as it explodes in our faces, the sound of child pleading, the smell of smoke and fear. Women survivors of war are not the single image portrayed on the television screen, but the glue that holds families and countries together. Perhaps by understanding women, and the other side of war ... we will have more humility in our discussions of wars... perhaps it is time to listen to womens side of history.

In terms of 'Saving Face,' I was inspired by the stories of survivors who didn't let their attacks stop them from pursuing justice and seeking treatment.

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.

It is easy to say that if such harassment happens, walk out of your job. But people depend on that job. It is about their livelihood, a question of survival. So while we must encourage victims for coming up with their #MeToo stories, we should not judge women for not sharing their stories.

The idea of 'Voice of Witness' is to let survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuses tell their story at length. It started with a course that I co-taught at U.C. Berkeley journalism school back in 2003.

The book is about zombies, in that it is the over-arching theme, but what's going on is the story of these people and how these survivors deal. I think that's so much more of an interesting story, and that's what really gets and hooks these readers into the book and the show. It's a mix of fans of drama, fans of AMC, fans of horror and fans of Frank [Darabont]. It's a lot of people just coming together and realizing a genre doesn't have to be fixed in one specific detail.

I've remained in touch with more than a dozen descendants of Gremlin Special survivors, victims, and rescuers. I treasured my friendship with Earl Walter Jr., the lead paratrooper who jumped into the valley to protect the survivors.

I went to Israel for two months in 1970 and worked on a kibbutz. It affected me on levels that I hadn't anticipated, working on a daily basis with people who were actual survivors of the Holocaust.

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.

But really, for me, I tried to find first-person accounts. I tried to read stories from men and women who had survived slavery because it's different when you hear it from their mouths instead of reading it from a history book.

The sea always offers up incredible stories of survivors' fortitude. Myths of a lot of countries have variations on that.

I'm not interested in playing the victim. I like stories about survivors.

People wait in line to see me, saying there's plenty of living to be done even if you have an HIV diagnosis. People say they are 10- or 15-year survivors and still moving forward.

When I first met the survivors of the Indianapolis in 1999 while writing a book about them, their story - the last major action of World War II - was rarely mentioned in high school textbooks. This is despite the fact that, before its torpedoing, the ship had delivered components of the atomic bomb Little Boy to Tinian Island.

I've been talking to people, and I've gone to hospitals, talked to survivors, to doctors, to caregivers. I just learned that there's really no one way for somebody to experience dealing with cancer.