Quotes About Holocaust

Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.

There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.

To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgently needed critique, is garbage.

It is curious how people's attitude to the existence of a supposedly empirical phenomenon depends so completely on their political outlook. It is as if policy determined facts and not facts policy. If people are against big government they tend to deny that there is any such phenomenon; if they are for big government they tend to regard it as established fact and equate those who deny its existence with Holocaust deniers.

Yet, nearly 6 decades after the Holocaust concluded, Anti-Semitism still exists as the scourge of the world.

Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.

Há muito que os comissários do gulag se tinham aposentado, com medalhas e pensões. Nem um único comparecera perante a justiça. A Rússia voltara as costas ao passado. Como podia eu entender? Desde o Holocausto, o meu mundo fizera da memória um dever. A Rússia, tal como a China, optara pelo esquecimento. Era assim que as pessoas sobreviviam, dizia o escritor Shamalov. Uma nação não se construía sobre a verdade.

Months later, after liberation, I met a friend from the old camp. He related to me how he, as camp policeman, had searched for a piece of human flesh that was missing from a pile of corpses. He confiscated it from a pot in which he found it cooking. Cannibalism had broken out. I had left just in time.

Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz.

Auschwitz—the very name stood for all that was horrible: gas chambers, crematoriums, massacres.

A man who looks miserable, down and out, sick and emaciated, and who cannot manage hard physical labor any longer … that is a 'Moslem.' Sooner or later, usually sooner, every 'Moslem' goes to the gas chambers. Therefore, remember: shave, stand and walk smartly; then you need not be afraid of gas

iba a hacer. En aquel momento comprendí, con toda crudeza, que ningún sueño, por horrible que fuera, podía ser peor que la realidad del Lager a la que cruelmente iba a devolverlo.

La historia de ese libro es sorprendente y apasionante. Apareció por primera vez en 1946 con el título Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (Un psicólogo en un campo de concentración).

But Frankl's concern is less with the question of why most died than it is with the question of why anyone at all survived.

los autores coinciden en señalar que el número de no-judíos muertos es superior al de los judíos

The prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days—after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide.

One literally became a number: dead or alive—that was unimportant; the life of a "number" was completely irrelevant.

One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past.

And all analogies to the Holocaust are tired, overworked, boring, probably insulting, possibly true, and a major turnoff.

Do you know that when Hitler's Final Solution to eliminate the Polish Jews was first mentioned in the Times it was on page twenty-eight. And on page six of the Washington Post.

The title of Treasury Secretary Morgenthau's report to Roosevelt was "Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews," which he wrote in 1944.

And for some men, years of swallowed rage, terror, and humiliation concentrated into what Holocaust survivor Jean Améry would call "a seething, purifying thirst for revenge.