Top 125 Holocaust Quotes

One can’t live with a child of Holocaust survivors without absorbing some of the same sensibilities that her parents transmitted to her as a young girl. It is an unspoken dread, a sense of fragility, an anxious anticipation of unseen horrors.

Must we wait for selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust, or can we take explicit steps to make our future more secure? In the latter case, must we not transcend selection?

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.

The Holocaust committed by the Nazis turned this country, where most of the European Jews used to live and where their culture used to flourish, into a massive grave. This is why initiatives to revive Jewish culture in Poland is so important.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.

There’s a basic problem with the history of the Holocaust. The people who do it don’t know the necessary languages.

Before I became an orphan of the Holocaust my early family life was stable. I grew up as a German Jew in Frankfurt, and I was in a household with two loving parents and an adoring grandmother who spoiled me. My mother helped my father in their wholesale business and they went to synagogue every Friday.

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.

My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late ’50s and early ’60s. As a result, he and my mother – both native southerners – were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.

I can’t really remember a time in my life when I didn’t know something about what we call the Holocaust. It was this dark topic that I would know more about when I got older, but which was spoken about in hushed tones.

Jews survived all the defeats, expulsions, persecutions and pogroms, the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people, even the Holocaust itself, because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.

We do a lot of shows for young people who have probably never been to the theater before and they are learning about the Holocaust, which unhappily, many of them do not know about.

Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense if not sheer fraud.

The Holocaust changed our perception of morality not only because we discovered that morality is the only thing that can stand up to the ultimate evil, but also because it shifted the focus from society to the individual.

There is a holocaust going on in my country, the world needs to acknowledge that and do something to help the people of North Korea.

The Holocaust also shows us how a combination of events and attitudes can erode a society’s democratic values.

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.

People are feeling and sensing a return of anti-Semitism – even in Europe, which, seventy years after the Holocaust, is a very scary thing. I think they are feeling that Israel is very isolated and doesn’t always get what they see as fair treatment in the European media.

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

There’s a lot going on in the world that’s very disturbing: rewriting the Holocaust; pseudo-historians rewriting history itself. And we’re dealing with a terrorist mentality that involves whole nations.

It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

I never experienced much outright anti-Semitism. While we learned about the Holocaust – endlessly, it felt like – no spray-painted swastika ever appeared on my childhood landscape. Jewish persecution was an ever-looming reality, but always an abstract one.

In my experience, the men of World War II, the vets of Vietnam, even guys coming back from Iraq, are loath to talk about their experiences. And the survivors of the Holocaust, particularly, are often very close-mouthed about their stories, even to their own children.

Without the railways, the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened. I don’t actually think the second world war would have happened without them.

It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.

Because of my experience with the Holocaust, I don’t like to lose friends.

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.

As freedom-loving people across the globe hope for an end to tyranny, we will never forget the enormous suffering of the Holocaust.

I do a lot of research. For ‘I Am Legend’, I did a lot of research about survivors. If everybody is dead around you, how you can keep surviving. I went to the bookstore and found psychiatry books about survivors from the Holocaust.

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 heard about the Holocaust before hearing the ‘Cinderella’ story or watching ‘Peter Pan.’

Miami Beach – that’s where I grew up, in a middle-class Jewish family led by my maternal grandfather. Me, my great-grandmother – a Holocaust survivor, who was my roommate – my grandparents, my mom and her brother all shared a four-bedroom house.

The Holocaust illustrates the consequences of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on a society. It forces us to examine the responsibilities of citizenship and confront the powerful ramifications of indifference and inaction.

I was brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My mother lost most of her family, and I didn’t realize how much the guilt of survivorship weighed on her until I was an adult.

There must be people who remember World War II and the Holocaust who can help us get out of this rut.

The holocaust against the unborn is the greatest sin they could ever do or even ever participate in.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

I believe, and I have always believed, that these events on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day should take place in Auschwitz and that this is the most important place to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.

The Human Rights Convention was written by Conservatives in the aftermath of the Second World War. It was designed to combat the risk of another Holocaust, and to try to stop people being sent to prison camps without trial.

My mother and father had been through the Holocaust. The family was wiped out. I grew up never knowing aunts, uncles, or grandparents.

You can talk about Holocaust denial, but it’s really marginal for the most part. What is compelling about the Armenian genocide, is how it has been forgotten.

The whole Indian thing, I always say it’s really the American holocaust. It’s something we need to look at.

Jewish Americans weren’t just integrated, like other ethnic and religious groups. They also attracted a particular sympathy and admiration, rooted in Holocaust remembrance, affection for Israel, and a distinctive pride in the scope of their success.

Arab youth are taught to wonder, ‘Since the Holocaust was a European affair, why are the Palestinians being forced to pay for the creation of Israel?’

For the Russians, the displacement of the Holocaust is calculated and cynical. It’s not emotional; they don’t care about the Holocaust one way or another. They only care about it insofar as they can use it to manipulate a German sense of guilt.

The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

The President of Iran has called for the destruction of Israel and the West and has even denied the holocaust took place. Iran and its terrorist arm Hezbollah are responsible for the current conflicts between Israel and Lebanon.

When I was in college, my school newspaper accepted an ad from a Holocaust revisionist organization. This would have been offensive on most college campuses across the country, but I went to a school with a very large Jewish population, so the ad, as you might expect, stirred absolute outrage.

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

The sad and horrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being murdered… This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust and this is the lesson which Auschwitz taught us.