Quotes from Thomas Buergenthal

But what else could we do but hope? that, after all, is human nature.

That hope never left us, and it sustained us in the years to come, despite the fact that we had no good reason to expect our situation to improve.

one cannot hope to protect mankind from crimes such as those that were visited upon us unless one struggles to brek the cycle of hatred and voilence that invariable leads to ever more suffering by innocent human beings.

It seemed that we were condemned to be who we were, which was not a particularly good prospect.

If we humans can so easily wash the blood of our fellow humans off our hands, then what hope is there for sparing our future generations from a repeat of the genocides and mass killings of the past?

Which is better: to dare to look directly into the blinding present, no matter how painful, or to await the detachment of hindsight -- which, being less painful, is more objective?

while it was important not to forget what happened to us in the Holocaust, it was equally important not to hold the descendants of the perpetrators responsible for what was done to us, lest the cycle of hate and violence never end.

It took me much longer to realize that one cannot hope to protect mankind from crimes such as those that were visited upon us unless one struggles to break the cycle of hatred and violence that invariably leads to ever more suffering by innocent human beings.

I doubt that we would have been able to preserve our sanity had we remained consumed by hatred for the rest of our lives. Many of our relatives and friends in America never understood what we meant when we tried to explain that, while it was important not to forget what happened to us in the Holocaust, it was equally important not to hold the descendants of the perpetrators responsible for what was done to us, lest the cycle of hate and violence never end.

treat them with humanity, not because we sought their gratitude or wanted to show how generous in spirit we were, but simply because our experience should have taught us to empathize with human beings in need, regardless of who they were.

The human mind is simply not able to grasp this terrible truth: a nation was transformed into a killing machine programmed to destroy millions of innocent people for no reason other than that they were different.