Quotes About Persecution

If Judeophobia has a millennial trajectory, anti-Semitism was born in the second half of the historical sequence noted above (1850–1950).

Between 1933 and 1938, a great exodus of German Jews began, far greater in its extent than that of the Spanish Jews after 1492 or that of the Huguenots after the revocation of the edict of Nantes. More than 450,000 Jews left central Europe as it came under Nazi rule.37 The whole of German-Jewish culture was exiled

Now emancipated, they became members of a political entity that transcended the borders of the religious community built around the synagogue; they ceased to be an external element, whether stigmatized or tolerated, persecuted or enjoying 'privileges' within society. Before this major turn they led a life apart, despite the generalized lack of political rights – their condition was certainly better than that of enserfed peasants.

Between 1880 and the Great War, some fifteen million emigrants arrived in the United States from southern and eastern Europe, Italy and the Balkans, the Habsburg and tsarist empires. Jews made up more than 10 per cent of this enormous mass, fleeing both anti-Semitic persecution and the social dislocation of the ghetto, with intensive industrialization and urbanization threatening the old structure of Jewish small trade.

They picked up all of the Jews from our very small town. They froze to death in the railway cars. You could see that? My father was standing watch there. They unloaded them afterward as corpses.

Poles and Russians had been detained in Auschwitz before it became a death camp for Jews,

heard in communist circles that numbers of Jews were being gassed."45.

Jewish organizations had pushed early on to make the persecution and murder of the Jews a key issue, the Allied military leadership regarded it as more important to wear down the German military and to make this the topic of the leaflets in order to undermine German morale.55

He was then exposed, and then he was also arrested, because he was a Jew. But where was he sent to? The people also knew about that.

But where the Jews were concerned, did they talk about that? Many people say that nobody talked about it. They're lying.

my cousin hid out at a friend's place. They already knew that it was dangerous for them, because the SA had been marching around grabbing up people from their homes and hauling them off. So my cousin went into hiding, and then the Nazis took his mother into custody, the so-called Sippenhaft [a kind of special arrest for family members].

one must keep in mind that most Jewish survivors in the survey had left Germany during the 1930s and had therefore only experienced the beginning years of National Socialism.

we found that the longer the survivors had remained in Germany, the more likely they were to have had their homes and businesses vandalized; to have been spied upon by their German neighbors, coworkers, and fellow classmates; and to have suffered verbal taunts and threats from German civilians.

nearly half of all respondents, both Jewish and non-Jewish, had broken the law in a variety of minor ways. Typical of these were listening to illegal foreign radio broadcasts, belonging to illegal youth groups, offering aid and support to people threatened by the Nazis, and speaking critically about Nazi leaders and policies in the company of friends and acquaintances.

While only a handful of the thousands of non-Jews who took our survey had ever been sent to jail, taken into protective custody, or sent to a concentration camp even though the majority had committed illegal acts during the Third Reich, great numbers of the Jewish respondents

Among Jews who had not emigrated, only a few had somehow managed to avoid incarceration. Most often these were either Jews in mixed marriages or the children of mixed marriages. A few others had gone into hiding, but the rest were all deported to concentration camps and ghettos.

But in a few years, as part of their effort to push Jews out of German public life, the Nazis would attempt to puah them out of the German church too. That these "non-Aryans" had publicly converted to the Christian faith meant nothing, since the lens through which the Nazis saw the world was purely racial. One's genetic makeup and ancestral bloodline were all that mattered; one's most deeply held beliefs counted for nothing.

Religion is the most fragile of all freedoms. And that's because it is the most threatening to those in power.

Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too. —HEINRICH HEINE

Heinrich Heine wrote the chilling words: "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen." Heine was a German Jew who converted to Christianity, and his words were a grim prophecy, meaning, "Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too." That

A state which which includes within itself a terrorized Church has lost its most faithful servant.

Martin Luther had written "Know, Christian, that next to the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous and violent than a true Jew

Ottomans invaded the Italian peninsula itself, seizing the city of Otranto on the southeastern coast, slaughtering the archbishop and many priests in the cathedral, forcibly converting the townspeople, beheading eight hundred who refused to convert, and sawing the bishop in half.

This had to be kept secret, of course, since only Catholic artists were allowed to work inside the Vatican, and especially in the pope's chapel. If it had been discovered that Buonarroti had denied the Church and veered into Valdesian Protestantism, he would not only have lost his career, but also his freedom—and possibly his life.