Quotes About Holocaust

In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.

To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns out to be not even a Holocaust denier but a Holocaust affirmer. There has to be a moral limit, and either this has to be it or we must cease pretending to ourselves that we observe one.

By order of the Higher SS and Police Leader . . . all male Jews between the ages of 17 and 45 convicted as plunderers are to be shot according to martial law. The shootings are to take place away from cities, villages, and thoroughfares.

The murder program accelerated in the spring of 1943. German troops entered the Warsaw ghetto and killed thousands of Jews in street fighting. In the south, the Nazis began deporting Greek Jews from Salonika to Auschwitz. In the north, they deported Dutch Jews to Sobibor, gassing about 34,000 people there as they arrived. The SS also arranged a special transport for 3,000 Jewish mothers and children from the Netherlands; they murdered all of them.11

German industry's unprecedented exploitation of slave labor became a crucial element of the Holocaust.

Private German banks and businesses used the SS registration data to take over about 5,000 of the most prosperous Jewish companies in less than eighteen months, according to contemporary SS reports, and liquidated about 21,000 smaller Jewish businesses to make room for competing German enterprises.

Morgenthau knew that a handful of Long's aides at State had for years systematically denied available U.S. visas to refugee Jews, suppressed intelligence about Hitler's Holocaust, and undermined efforts to establish a commission to document Nazi atrocities. Recently he had learned that Long's group at State had sabotaged a deal that could have purchased survival for 70,000 Romanian Jews for a mere $170,000 in Romanian currency.37

The Nazis organized the extirpation of between 700,000 and one million Jews and Poles between September 1939 and the summer of 19424—a casualty rate approaching that which the Turks had achieved in a comparable time using nearly identical methods.

Wolff was successful in that effort and wrote of his "special joy (besondere Freude) now that five thousand members of the Chosen People are going to Treblinka every day.

Some sense of the death toll can be gleaned from the fact that SS spokesmen at the Wannsee conference contended that construction labor on the Eastern Front should become one of the main vehicles for wiping out every living Jew in Europe.

Poland, it was said, had become a "slaughter house [where] the ghettoes are being systematically emptied of all Jews … none of those that are taken away are ever heard of again.

The radio announced that western Poland would be "Jew free" by December 1942. The occupation government in Holland pledged to deport all Jews by June of the following year.

Danger only threatens when a political system sends those not-decent people, i.e., the negative element of a nation, to the top. And no nation is immune from doing this, and in this respect every nation is in principle capable of a Holocaust!

In the spring, tattered and emaciated Jews who had spent the war in the concentration camps to the east had begun to return. Those who had lost family members peered into the faces of these walking skeletons, struggling to find the people they were so sure they'd never see again. Sometimes, there were joyous reunions. Mostly, though, the survivors returned to find that everyone they loved had perished and that their reward for enduring hell was a renewed sense of loss and despair.

As we know from Richard Glazar's story, 24,000 Bulgarians – those who had been in Salonika – did die in Treblinka in the spring of 1943; but there can be little doubt that the 25,000 Jews of Sofia were saved by the intervention of the future Pope and the courage of a king.

But I can't help thinking about the graves I saw on this summer's trip, and the millions of people in them, and the millions more without graves. The ones who are smoke. And I find that I can feel it, at last. Or that I've always felt it, without knowing what it was: the Holocaust, roaring down the generations like a wave of radiation, eradicating, in everyone it touches, the ability to trust people, experience joy; fall in love, believe in love when you see it in others. ("Dancing Men")

Of the approximately 2,900 Jewish Nasielskers who remained in Poland, fewer than ten survived the war.

The name of the Vatican body investigating the nuns is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the same body that conducted the Inquisition, which came to be known as the Holocaust of Women because as many as eight million women healers and leaders of pre-Christian Europe were killed by torture and burning at the stake over more than five hundred years.

From my own point of view, the fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms. White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded—at least, in the same way.

White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded—at least, in the same way.

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

In Germany, of course, the Holocaust will always be in our history and a big stain on our lives.

When the Holocaust happened, I was 15 years old. My parents kept it a secret from me, despite belonging to the Red Cross. I only found out about it much later. Even today I still feel guilty, because I was an ignoramus between the age of 15 and 25. I am sorry I couldn't stand up for them.

To me, the Holocaust stands alone as the most horrible human event in modern civilization.