Top 25 Auschwitz Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Auschwitz Quotes from famous people such as Gunter Grass, Witold Pilecki, Edward Bond, Billy Graham, Diane von Furstenberg, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Auschwitz speaks against even a right to self-determina

Auschwitz speaks against even a right to self-determination that is enjoyed by all other peoples because one of the preconditions for the horror, besides other, older urges, was a strong and united Germany.
Gunter Grass
During the first 3 years at Auschwitz, 2 million people died; over the next 2 years – 3 million.
Witold Pilecki
We cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and – to our benefit! – has made possible an insight that could be summarized as, ‘Now we finally know ourselves.’
Gunter Grass
Humanity’s become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.
Edward Bond
Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.
Billy Graham
Eighteen months before I was born, my mother was in Auschwitz. She weighed 49 pounds. She always told me that God saved her so she could give me life. I was born out of nothing.
Diane von Furstenberg
When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.
Viktor E. Frankl
Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.
Edward Bond
Anderson Cooper’s on-air reaction to Bob Simon’s death; Wolf Blitzer personalizing his experience in going back to Auschwitz where his grandparents lost their lives – I think that has all made our air more authentic.
Jeff Zucker
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.
Ronen Bergman
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.
Yair Lapid
When we write about Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least, suspended literature. One can only write a black novel about Auschwitz or – you should excuse the expression – a cheap serial, which begins in Auschwitz and is still not over.
Imre Kertesz
I know that elections must be limited only to those who understand that the Arabs are the deadly enemy of the Jewish state, who would bring on us a slow Auschwitz – not with gas, but with knives and hatchets.
Meir Kahane
There is much that makes one pause in ‘If This is a Man’, the record of Levi’s 11-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath of common air.
Howard Jacobson
I work all the time; whatever I do, I do it, and I don’t necessarily look at it as work. You could say the Auschwitz project was work, or the Lowy Institute is work, or Westfield is work, or the football is work. It is life.
Frank Lowy
Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Viktor E. Frankl
I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ‘among the most unspeakable crimes in history.’ I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.
Noam Chomsky
We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.
George Steiner
Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War – thousands of them in Auschwitz – we’re again preparing the mass killing of this minority.
Antonio Tabucchi
Sometimes I am asked if I know ‘the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don’t even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.
Elie Wiesel
For me, one of the most interesting columns to write was about Dick Cheney when he represented the U.S. at a commemorative ceremony at Auschwitz.
Robin Givhan
So they didn’t let anybody else off. I can’t live like this, I’m finished. Auschwitz was easy.
Witold Pilecki
I was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didn’t bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn’t know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection.
Imre Kertesz
My mother arrived in Brussels in 1938 from a small town near Krakow. But strangely enough, in 1942 or 1943, she was taken back to Auschwitz, which was just 30 miles from where she grew up. Her parents died there and a lot of her family.
Chantal Akerman
My own interest in Kafka’s letter came about when I was writing an article on Peter Ginz, the boy novelist held in Terezin, not far from Prague, and exterminated in Auschwitz by the Nazis. The Ginz family were from more or less the same milieu as the Kafkas.
Justin Cartwright