Quotes About History

I have tried to keep memory alive... I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.

Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent?

To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.     SOMETIMES

Even if I wrote on nothing else, it would never be enough, even if all the survivors did nothing but write about their experiences, it would still not be enough. *Response when asked how much longer is he going to write about the Holocaust

It was a destructive novel of acquired ideas. To finally wake up in a state of creative anguish, to lose oneself in order to find oneself again, to sleep in the arms of a beautiful student whose name one didn't know, to fall back to sleep over a love poem-that was called existence. The harmonics of artistic creation, of fertile sensibility, of anticipated events-history in movement-that was called a privilege.

To forget a holocaust is to kill twice.

I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

How was it possible that men, women, and children are being burned and that the world kept silent?

Jusqu'alors j'avais toujours cru que la mission du Juif consistait à être le tremblement de l'Histoire, plutôt que le vent qui la fait trembler.

I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people."     THAT

I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else . He alone has kept his promises , all his promises , to the Jewish people .

They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns. This took place in the Galician forest, near Kolomay

I am not so naïve as to believe that this slim volume will change the course of history or shake the conscience of the world. Books no longer have the power they once did. Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow. THE

Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.

It was at Auschwitz that human beings underwent their first mutations. Without Auschwitz, there would have been no Hiroshima. Or genocide in Africa. Or attempts to dehumanize man by reducing him to a number, an object: it was at Auschwitz that the methods to be used were conceived, catalogued, and perfected. It was at Auschwitz that men mutilated and gambled with the future. The despair begotten at Auschwitz will linger for generations.

Some events do take place but are not true; others are, although they never occurred.

I remember he asked his father, "Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?" And

This was the first story I had ever heard in which the Jews were not the ones to be afraid. Until this moment I had believed that the mission of the Jews was to represent the trembling of history rather than the wind which made it tremble

In front of us, those flames. In the air, the smell of burning flesh. It must have been around midnight. We had arrived. In Birkenau.

Special units would then disinter the corpses and burn them. Thus, for the first time in history, Jews were not only killed twice but denied burial in a cemetery.

The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.