Quotes About Atrocity

For this reason I believe that only humans are capable of true evil—only we can sit down and, in cold blood, work out ways to torture people, to inflict pain. Carefully plan horrific cruelty.

It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends.

She gave me another piece of information which excited other feelings in me, scarcely less dreadful. Infants were sometimes born in the convent; but they were always baptized and immediately strangled!

The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.

As an SS officer said to the guards at Dachau: "Any of the comrades who can't see blood should resign. The more of these bastards go down, the fewer of them we'll have to feed."4

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.

A team of just twelve Moscow NKVD men shot 20,761 people at Butovo, on the outskirts of Moscow, in 1937 and 1938.57

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 fourteen million were murdered over the course of only twelve years, between 1933 and 1945, while both Hitler and Stalin were in power.

Hitler foresaw a "resolution of the Polish problem" by the murder of those who might be regarded as fully human.

In the winter of 1942–1943, the Germans began to separate the Jews not into two but into three groups: the men, the older women, and the young women. They sent the young women into the gas last, because they liked to look at their naked bodies in the cold. By then the corpses were burned rather than buried. The pyres were huge grills made from railway rails laid upon concrete pillars, some thirty meters across. By spring 1943, fires

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

When genocide is committed, it must be seen. People must look at it with open eyes, not minimize its impact.

They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won't want to know we were living in a rape camp.

when the atrocities a person has lived through are passed over in silence for lack of any trace or archive, paying tribute to someone would be a hoax. How do you convey Africa's silences?" Then

There were some ten million Jews living in 1939 in the territories occupied by Hitler's forces. By any estimate it is certain that nearly half of them were exterminated by the Germans. This was the final consequence and the shattering cost of the aberration which came over the Nazi dictator in his youthful gutter days in Vienna and which he imparted to—or shared with—so many of his German followers.

But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?

Those who participate in a genocide as well as those who merely look away rarely volunteer much in the way of anecdote or observation. Same with the heroic and the righteous. Usually it's only the survivors who speak-and often they don't want to talk much about it either. p. 75

There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.

They were people I knew, neighbors actually, acting like animals. They killed thousands of Tutsis. The machetes they used to cut people were the same as they used to cut crops and cows, they didn't care.

Rape is as much of a weapon of war as the machete, club, or Kalashnikov.

this was a war waged predominantly upon civilians;5 moreover millions of them were killed not by invaders and strangers, but by their own compatriots, including their own neighbours.

Evil, above all evil on the scale practiced by Nazi Germany, can never be satisfactorily remembered. The very enormity of the crime renders all memorialisation incomplete. Its inherent implausibility—the sheer difficulty of conceiving of it in calm retrospect—opens the door to diminution and even denial. Impossible to remember as it truly was, it is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn't.