The Holocaust Quotes

“The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man • The Truce

“It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbor to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model of
thinking man than the most primitive pigmy or the most vicious sadist".”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man • The Truce

“I will never be able to go back to Sweden without knowing inside myself that I'd done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible”
― Raoul Wallenberg

“They are the typical product of the structure of the German Lager: if one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery, exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their
comrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept. He will be withdrawn from the common law and will become untouchable; the more power that he is given, the more he will be consequently hateful and
hated. When he is given the command of a group of unfortunates, with the right of life or death over them, he will be cruel and tyrannical, because he will understand that if he is not sufficiently so, someone else, judged more suitable, will take over his post.

Moreover, his capacity for hatred, unfulfilled in the direction of the oppressors, will double back, beyond all reason, on the oppressed; and he will only be satisfied when he has unloaded onto his underlings the injury received from above.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man • The Truce

“Make government the herder of the flock, and the herder will cull the undesirable sheep.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Those of us directed towards the right were lined up in threes with much shooting and beating. I was in the first row, at the platform’s edge. Suddenly, we see a group of older women and women with children nearing the road, under the platform. In the first row I see my mother supported on both sides by two friends. She too becomes aware of me. And out of the throat of this reticent, soft-spoken woman who I don’t remember ever raising her voice, breaks out a terrible, desperate, piercingly loud, howling shout: ‘GYURIKA!!!”
― Azriel Feuerstein

“One night I heard one of the refugees say, “There are atrocities that one should not speak about.”
“Why?” wondered another refugee.
“I can’t explain it to you.”
“You have to speak about everything, so that everyone will know what they did to us.”
“I’m not going to argue with you.”
“If we won’t be witnesses, who will bear witness?”
“They won’t believe us, anyway.”
― Aharon Appelfeld, The Story of a Life

“The Jews are cowering along the wall, eyes wide, palms up, fingers splayed -- a collective posture of submission. Even now, with everything that has happened, with the city in ruins and the dead as thick upon the streets as busted glass, they don't want to believe we are actually going to kill them. We are Germans, after all; the most civilized people in Europe. And we are soldiers, not murderers. Except for today. Today we are both.”
― Miles Watson, The Action

“When we arrived at the Lodz ghetto, I was sixteen years old and Ruth was five. My mother was forty-six, my father forty-eight.

When I left the Lodz ghetto, I was seventeen years old and Ruth was five. My mother was forty-six, my father forty-eight.

When I die, I will be an old man...But even then I will always know that my sister is five. She will always be five.”
― Katherine Locke

“The claim that Darwin’s theories were at the core of eugenics, the racial science at the core of Nazism, are not new. They are not revisionist history made upon the revelations of the Death Camps. These claims precede The Holocaust by several decades. American and British icons of science, namely Darwin’s relatives and colleagues, were making this claim before Adolf Hitler was even born, and continued to do so on up through the end of WWII.”
― A.E. Samaan, H.H. Laughlin: American Scientist, American Progressive, Nazi Collaborator

“The dust and debris of this world already outnumbers the population, but to understand that an insignificant particle of matter has more freedom than so many humans—it’s incomprehensible.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Secret in the Attic

“I love you are my Last Words, and they will always belong to you.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Girl with the Diary

“A world of meaning is lost when these views of racial ideology, the brutalization of war and the state-run process of extermination dominate our understanding of the Holocaust because the question "Why did the Nazis and other Germans burn the Hebrew Bible?" demands a historical imagination that captures Germans' culture, sensibilities, and historical memories.”
― Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide

“There was an inner sense to the Nazi persecution and extermination of the Jews, for the progressive removal of the Jews meant the conquering of time - of the present in 1933 through their exclusion from German society; of a moral past in 1938 through the elimination of Judaism and the Bible; and ultimately of history, and therefore of the future, in 1941 through the extermination from the face of the earth of all the Jews as the source of all historical evil.”
― Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide