Quotes About Auschwitz

On the 70th anniversary of Auschwitz, mourning dead Jews is easy. And, forgive me, cheap. Want to truly honor the dead? Show solidarity with the living—Israel and its six million Jews. Make "never again" more than an empty phrase. It took Nazi Germany seven years to kill six million Jews. It would take a nuclear Iran one day.

When we think of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, we imagine Auschwitz and mechanized impersonal death. This was a convenient way for Germans to remember the Holocaust, since they could claim that few of them had known exactly what had happened behind those gates. In fact, the Holocaust began not in the death facilities, but over shooting pits in eastern Europe.

Considerably more Polish Jews resident in France were killed than French Jews resident in France. Statelessness followed these thirty thousands murdered Polish Jews to Paris, to Drancy, to Auschwitz, to the gas chambers, to the crematoria, and to oblivion.

Auschwitz has also become the standard shorthand of the Holocaust because, when treated in a certain mythical and reductive way, it seems to separate the mass murder of Jews from human choices and actions. Insofar

Auschwitz was unusual, however, in one important respect. Unlike the death pits in the doubly occupied zone and the occupied Soviet Union, unlike the death facilities at Be??ec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Che?mno, it was the planned murder site for very large numbers of Jews who were still citizens of states that Germany recognized as sovereign.

Auschwitz speaks against even a right to self-determination that is enjoyed by all other peoples because one of the preconditions for the horror, besides other, older urges, was a strong and united Germany.

For example, the great Italian Jewish author Primo Levi, who did survive Auschwitz, said afterwards, "The experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away whatever legacies of my religious education that I had retained. There is Auschwitz, therefore God cannot exist. I haven't found a solution to that dilemma.

At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook.

The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?" And the answer: "Where was man?

Aushwitze itself remains explicable. The most profound statement yet made upon Aushwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query, 'At Aushwitze, tell me, where was God?' And the answer: 'Where was man?

Auschwitz, where she wound up in a block for young girls.

The road to Auschwitz was built by hate but paved with indifference

I believe, and I have always believed, that these events on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day should take place in Auschwitz and that this is the most important place to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.

Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz.

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.

Today, I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.

No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz.

I am persuaded that normal human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed toward a goal and that idleness, or aimless work (like Auschwitz's Arbeit), gives rise to suffering and to atrophy.

The things I had seen and suffered were burning inside of me; I felt closer to the dead than the living, and felt guilty at being a man, because men had built Auschwitz, and Auschwitz had gulped down millions of human beings, and many of my friends, and a woman who was dear to my heart.

otro, a costa de otro; podría haber suplantado a alguien, es decir, en realidad matado a alguien. Los «salvados» de Auschwitz no eran los mejores, los predestinados al bien, los portadores de un mensaje; cuanto yo había visto y vivido me demostraba precisamente lo contrario.

La libertà, l'improbabile, impossibile libertà, così lontana da Auschwitz che solo nei sogni osavamo sperarla, era giunta[...]. Era intorno a noi, ma sotto forma di una spietata pianura deserta. Ci aspettavano altre prove, altre fatiche, altre fami, altri geli, altre paure.

Hier, vorübergehend fern von Flüchen und von Schlägen, haben wir die Möglichkeit, wieder zu uns selbst zu finden und nachzudenken, und da wird uns klar, dass wir nie zurückkehren werden. (...) Wir werden nicht zurückkehren. Von hier darf keiner fort, denn er könnte mit dem ins Fleisch geprägten Mal auch die böse Kunde in die Welt tragen, was in Auschwitz Menschen aus Menschen zu machen gewagt haben.

Il mestiere di chimico (fortificato, nel mio caso, dall'esperienza di Auschwitz) insegna a superare, anzi ad ignorare, certi ribrezzi, che non hanno nulla di necessario né di congenito: la materia è materia, né nobile né vile, infinitamente trasformabile, e non importa affatto quale sia la sua origine prossima.

Auschwitz: un nombre carente de cualquier significado entonces para nosotros pero que tenía que corresponder a un lugar de este mundo.