Quotes About Remembrance

Jewish resistance in Warsaw was not only about the dignity of the Jews but about the dignity of humanity as such, including those of the Poles, the British, the Americans, the Soviets: of everyone who could have done more, and instead did less.30

When the mass murder of Jews is limited to an exceptional place and treated as the result of impersonal procedures, then we need not confront the fact that people not very different from us murdered other people not very different from us at close quarters.

To be enlisted posthumously into competing national memories, bolstered by the numbers of which your life has become a part, is to sacrifice individuality. It is to be abandoned by history, which begins from the assumption that each person is irreducible.

Germans carried out what they called the "Great Action," deporting some 265,040 Jews to the death factory at Treblinka to be

The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler...this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar.

The Jewish barbers, who cut the hair of thousands of women, remembered the beautiful ones.

But the concentration camps are not where most of the victims of National Socialism and Stalinism died. These misunderstandings regarding the sites and methods of mass killing prevent us from perceiving the horror of the twentieth century. Germany was the site of concentration camps liberated by the Americans and the British in 1945; Russian Siberia was of course the site of much of the Gulag, made

The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.

When history is removed, numbers go upward and memories go inward, to all of our peril.

Cultures of memory are organized by round numbers, intervals of ten; but somehow the remembrance of the dead is easier when the numbers are not round, when the final digit is not a zero. So within the Holocaust, it is perhaps easier to think of 780,863 different people at Treblinka: where the three at the end might be Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung together after they were gassed,

Forget me, but don't forget my name.

Courtesy of the Moser family.)

I certainly think that another Holocaust can happen again. It did already occur; think of Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia.

Long afterward, many would remember those two days in the first week of October with vividness and anguish.

I feel a special bond with the Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.

Bob Marley's in every new day. There's not one day that his music is not played all over the world.

There has not been one day since I left that I have not thought about Haiti.

Some of us only meet in the most fleeting moments; some of us never meet, but still hear about one another and therefore cherish what we know from what we've heard, and mourn the loss, even though we're spared what the close-loved ones must endure - the ongoing pain of an empty place in the heart for the rest of life.

There is something not entirely satisfying about an online memorial.

I think all creative people are operating from the fear that, of the best of what they did, will anybody remember it? Will anybody tell stories about them? Will anybody keep those pictures on the mantle long after they are gone? It's why people write stories. It's peoples' grave markers.

But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering ? curious as it may sound to you ? is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.

I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should probably forget all about them.' 'Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.

And when you are away, Gerald...with...her - oh, think of me sometimes. Don't forget me.

She sang of the Love that is perfected by death, of the Love that dies not in the tomb.