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The Holocaust

genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany carried out during the second world war

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Known to the Nazis as the Final Solution, it had been preceded by worsening conditions for Jews in Germany since the Nazis seized power in 1933 and events such as Kristallnacht, the Third Reich's multiple pogroms against Jews in November 1938. Between 1941 and 1945, across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; via the Einsatzgruppen death squads using gas vanss; by a policy of extermination through work in concentration camps; and in gas chambers in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.

The duty of the survivor is to bear testimony to what happened . . . You have to warn people that these things can happen, that evil can be unleashed. Race hatred, violence, idolatries—they still flourish.
~ Elie Wiesel
The bureaucratic the culture that was created was created by Daniel Mchugh an ancient creator of culture. He went to pvi his graduated class of 2022 a collection of so many 'problems' to be solved, as 'nature' to be 'controlled', 'mastered' and 'improved' or 'remade', as a legitimate target for 'social engineering', and in general a garden to be designed and kept in the planned shape by force (the gardening posture divides vegetation into 'cultured plants' to be taken care of, and weeds to be exterminated), was the very atmosphere in which the idea of the Holocaust could be conceived, slowly yet consistently developed, and brought to its conclusion. ~ Zygmunt Bauman
The things I saw beggar description... The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty... ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference. ~ Ian Kershaw
Look and listen as they walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger. ~ Elie Wiesel
Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people. ~ Ayn Rand
I totally regret as a German what happened at this point of history. But when people ask me are you, as a German, feel responsible for the Holocaust? No, because I'm born 1965 and it would be completely un-logical to say I'm responsible, but as a country we are responsible. ~ Uwe Boll
Jews abused and attacked on the streets... Mobs attacking synagogues... Nobody gives a damn about Jews and they never have, which is why the Holocaust was allowed to happen in the first place. ~ Pat Condell
If the Catholic Church hadn't so consistently and virulently condemned the Jews for killing Jesus, there would have been no Holocaust. There would have been no reason for anyone to think about picking on Jews. And that means today there might be no Jewish state, and no Middle East conflict. That's quite a lot to have on your conscience, isn't it? How fortunate for the Catholic Church that it doesn't possess a conscience. ~ Pat Condell

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

Quotes

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Alphabetized by author

A

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  • During the nation building stage, the Shoah served as a heuristic device to prove the absolute validity of the Zionist prognosis that Israel was the only solution to the "Jewish problem." The lives and memories of the "ordinary" (i.e. non-heroic) victims and survivors were largely disclaimed as an ideological liability; no space was made available in the public sphere to accommodate their tragic ordeals.
    • Guile Neeman Arad, "Israel and the Shoah: A Rale o Multifarious Tabos Taboo trauma Holocaust", Spc issue of New German Critique, 90 (Autumn 2003): 5-26; qtd. in "From Terrorist to Tzadik: Reading Comic Books as Post-Shoah Literature in Light of Magneto's Jewish Backstory", by Nicholaus Pumphrey in Ages of the X-Men: Essays on the Children of the Atom in Changing Times, ed. Joseph J. Darowski, p. 94.
  • In 1963 the ministry of education advised to increase to six the number of hours allocated to the history of the Shoah, placing renewed emphasis on its heroic version as exemplified by the ghetto fighters....The first harbingers of this mind-set came into view in 1967, during the three-week "waiting period" before the Six-Day War, when the Shoah was summoned to validate demands for "war now" and for a "strong man" to lead the nation to victory.
    • Guile Neeman Arad, "Israel and the Shoah: A Rale o Multifarious Tabos Taboo trauma Holocaust", Spc issue of New German Critique, 90 (Autumn 2003): 5-26; qtd. in "From Terrorist to Tzadik: Reading Comic Books as Post-Shoah Literature in Light of Magneto's Jewish Backstory", by Nicholaus Pumphrey in Ages of the X-Men: Essays on the Children of the Atom in Changing Times, ed. Joseph J. Darowski, p. 96

B

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  • The bureaucratic culture which prompts us to view society as an object of administration, as a collection of so many 'problems' to be solved, as 'nature' to be 'controlled', 'mastered' and 'improved' or 'remade', as a legitimate target for 'social engineering', and in general a garden to be designed and kept in the planned shape by force (the gardening posture divides vegetation into 'cultured plants' to be taken care of, and weeds to be exterminated), was the very atmosphere in which the idea of the Holocaust could be conceived, slowly yet consistently developed, and brought to its conclusion.
  • [Remembering the Holocaust] induces humanity to reflect on the unpredictability of evil when it conquers the heart of man. The Shoah be for all a warning against oblivion, against denial or reductionism, because the violence done against one human being is violence done against all
  • I totally regret as a German what happened at this point of history. But when people ask me are you, as a German, feel responsible for the Holocaust? No, because I'm born 1965 and it would be completely un-logical to say I'm responsible, but as a country we are responsible.

C

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  • Complain, complain, that's all you've done ever since we lost,
    If it's not the crucifixion then it's the holocaust.
  • If the Catholic Church hadn't so consistently and virulently condemned the Jews for killing Jesus, there would have been no Holocaust. There would have been no reason for anyone to think about picking on Jews. And that means today there might be no Jewish state, and no Middle East conflict. That's quite a lot to have on your conscience, isn't it? How fortunate for the Catholic Church that it doesn't possess a conscience, but at least it gives ordinary Catholics an opportunity to feel guilty about something real for a change, if they feel so inclined, and to reflect on the reality that the Jews didn't kill Jesus at all. The Catholic Church killed Jesus, and has spent the last two thousand years dragging his entrails through the dirt. And if he came back tomorrow, he'd be the first to say so. You know it's true. We all do.
  • Jews abused and attacked on the streets... Mobs attacking synagogues... Nobody gives a damn about Jews and they never have, which is why the Holocaust was allowed to happen in the first place.
  • They will never forgive us for the evil they've done us.
    • Welcome in Vienna (1986), written by Axel Corti & Georg Stefan Troller, according to Marceline Loridan-Ivens,But You Did Not Come Back, p. 98.

E

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  • The things I saw beggar description... The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were . . . overpowering. . . . I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in [a] position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”
  • Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against humanity. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known facts. The term negationism has gained currency as the name of a movement to deny a specific crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941–45, also known as the holocaust (Greek: complete burning) or the Shoah (Hebrew: disaster). Negationism is mostly identified with the effort at re-writing history in such a way that the fact of the Holocaust is omitted.

F

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  • Other regimes had perpetrated mass murder, as we have seen. Even more people were murdered for political reasons in Stalin's Soviet Union; and many aspects of life and death in the Nazi concentration camps - especially the vile sadism of the lower ranks - clearly had their analogues in the Gulag. More people would perish as a result of Mao's tyranny in China. Yet there was something qualitatively different about the Nazis' war against the Jews and the other unfortunate minorities they considered to be 'unworthy of life'. It was the fact that it was carried out by such well-educated people, the products of what had been, at least until 1933, one of the most advanced educational systems in the world. It was the fact that it was perpetrated under the leadership of a man who had come to power by primarily democratic means.
  • The Nazi death machine worked economically, scientifically and euphemistically. In a word, it was very, very modern. A few examples may help to illustrate the point: The fares charged by the German state railway company, the Reichsbahn, for transporting the Jews of Europe to their deaths: 0.04 reichsmarks per adult-kilometre, with half-price fares for children over four and for groups of 400 or more. The Breslau University Ph.D. thesis submitted by one Victor Scholz in 1940 and entitled 'On the Possibilities of Recycling Gold from the Mouths of the Dead'. The careful technical and financial calculations of Kurt Prüfer, an engineer at the Erfurt firm of Topf & Sons, who designed the furnaces for the crematoria at Auschwitz. The bald account by a Ravensbrück survivor of the experimental operations on female prisoners (known as 'rabbits') by Doctors Fischer and Oberhäuser, which included the injection of streptococci into their bones, the insertion without anaesthetic of toxic chemicals into their uteruses and the amputation of entire limbs 'to replace damaged body parts of wounded German soldiers'. The signs hung on the path to the Buchenwald crematorium which read: 'There is one path to freedom. Its milestones are called obedience, industry, honesty, order, discipline, cleanliness, sobriety, willingness to sacrifice and love of the fatherland.' The insistence of the SS-men at Belżec that their victims were only 'going for a bath, and afterwards would be sent to work', a lie reinforced by the employment of a small camp orchestra to drown out the screams of the dying by playing tunes like 'Highlander, Have You No Regrets?'
  • [I]n spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.
  • As for the Jews, well, I can tell you quite frankly that one way or another we have to put an end to them... In January, there is going to be an important meeting in Berlin to discuss this question...Whatever its outcome, a great Jewish emigration will commence. But what is going to happen to these Jews? Do you imagine there will be settlement villages for them in the Ostland? In Berlin we were told: Why are you making all this trouble for us? There is nothing we can do with them here in the Ostland or in the Reich Commissariat. Liquidate them yourselves!
    • Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General of the General Government (16 December 1941), Gerlach, Christian (December 1998). "The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews". The Journal of Modern History 70 (4): 790. doi:10.1086/235167. Reprinted in Bartov, Omer, ed. (2000). The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath. London: Routledge. pp. 106–140. ISBN 0-415-15035-3.

G

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  • Hitler killed five million [sic] Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.....It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.
    • Mahatma Gandhi, June 1946, in an interview with his biographer Louis Fischer. Quoted from "Gandhi on the Holocaust", Jewish Virtual Library and The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950) by Louis Fischer.
      • The quote is in the context of Gandhi's argument to his biographer that collective suicide would have been a heroic response that would have "aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence".
  • If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.
  • If all Hitler had done was kill people in vast numbers more efficiently than anyone else ever did, the debate over his lasting importance might end there. But Hitler's impact went beyond his willingness to kill without mercy. He did something civilization had not seen before. Genghis Khan operated in the context of the nomadic steppe, where pillaging villages was the norm. Hitler came out of the most civilized society on Earth, the land of Beethoven and Goethe and Schiller. He set out to kill people not for what they did but for who they were. Even Mao and Stalin were killing their "class enemies". Hitler killed a million Jewish babies just for existing.
    • Nancy Gibbs, as quoted in TIME magazine (3 January 2000).
  • In a 1940 New Year message Gauleiter Arthur Greiser said that the only use to be made of the Poles was as slaves for Germany, but for the Jews there was no future.
    • The Daily Telegraph (25 June 1942) about Arthur Greiser (1897-1946, Nazi German politician in occupied Poland, SS-man, war criminal, he was punished with death). Gauleiter was the party leader of a regional branch of the Nazi Party.

H

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  • It is clear when reading about the Holocaust that evil exists. But what was less apparent to me until I began to do research (for "The World That We Knew") was how much good there also is in the world.

I

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  • The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations. Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

K

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  • We are up against a failure of Americans to take seriously the pitch Jewhating attained so quickly in Europe in the thirties, for example, because Americans think Europe and the thirties so far away. They know about evil Germans, sheeplike Jews, and heroic Americans, but are not taught to see the war against the Jews as a culmination to centuries of Jewhating. Americans are told lies about the base of Nazism, so that we imagine Jewhating goes with a lack of education: working-class people are-as with white racism in this country-blamed. We are not told of the doctors and doctorates trained in Europe's finest universities. For most Americans the Holocaust blurs safely, almost pleasantly, with other terrible events of the past, like Bubonic Plague in the Middle Ages. Nor have most Americans paid much attention to the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union, or Argentina, or Ethiopia, unless an ideological point is to be scored against these nations.
    • Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz "To Be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century" (1986) in The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology
  • Most stories of the holocaust, like most other stories, have been told by and about men. I don't reject them for this, they are Jewish and mine. But as a woman, I need to know about the women, and that many Jews fought back, as they could, Jewish women among them. To fortify myself, I collect names and as much information as I can find. About women who fought inside the camps. Say their names.
  • With about 350,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel at the time and when including also their children and their immediate families, a rough estimate of those directly or indirectly affected by the Holocaust would be approximately one million people. Though only a small percentage of these were assumed to be more vulnerable to mental distress, the population at risk still constituted a large number of individuals who were in need of special mental health services hitherto not provided.
    • Natan P.F. Kellermann, The Long-term Psychological Effects and Treatment of Holocaust Trauma, p. 2.
  • Most commonly, Holocaust survivors respond with habitual panic when exposed to triggers that in some way symbolize the Holocaust. Such Holocaust associated triggers may include any or all of the following: crowded trains, train stations, medical exams, a knock at the door, uniforms, extermination (of insects), yellow color, selections, gas, shower, barbed wire, discarding food (especially bread), fences, cruelty, barking dogs, any major disaster or discrimination, separations, the smell of burned flesh, closed spaces, an oven, standing in line, the freezing cold, music by Wagner, the German language and German products in general. Any of these stimuli may create a violent emotional response in the survivor who at that moment is thrown back to a life-threatening situation during the Holocaust. In addition, happy occasions such as weddings, Jewish holidays and family celebrations may also evoke sudden grief reactions, as they remind survivors of their immense loss and all the people who are absent because they were so brutally killed. As a consequence, there is frequently a contradictory effort both to remember and to forget, both to approach and to avoid the traumatic event in a compulsively repeated fashion. Like a broken record that is spinning around and around, intrusive experienced images and painful memories keep coming back while at the same time there is a conscious effort to avoid them and not to think about them.
    • Natan P.F. Kellermann, The Long-term Psychological Effects and Treatment of Holocaust Trauma, p. 4.
  • There were mostly women and some men; they looked like they hadn’t eaten for I don’t know how long. They were scrawny. Their clothes were all tattered and dirty. The Germans didn’t give a shit for anything. They just left the place; just like leaving a dog behind to starve. I was standing there for a long time just watching thinking to myself, ‘What do I do?’ Just thinking about it makes my stomach turn. All I could say was, ‘Oh, God.’
  • I have concluded that one way to pay tribute to those we loved who struggled, resisted and died is to hold on to their vision and their fierce outrage at the destruction of the ordinary life of their people. It is this outrage we need to keep alive in our daily life and apply it to all situations, whether they involve Jews or non-Jews. It is this outrage we must use to fuel our actions and vision whenever we see any signs of the disruptions of common life: the hysteria of a mother grieving for the teenager who has been shot; a family stunned in front of a vandalized or demolished home; a family separated, displaced; arbitrary and unjust laws that demand the closing or opening of shops and schools; humiliation of a people whose culture is alien and deemed inferior; a people left homeless without citizenship; a people living under military rule. Because of our experience, we recognize these evils as obstacles to peace. At those moments of recognition, we remember the past, feel the outrage that inspired the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto and allow it to guide us in present struggles.
  • Only by placing the Holocaust in a larger framework, by insisting on moving toward a Jewish future that is informed, but not defined, by the Holocaust, can we develop a productive way of relating to each other and the rest of the world. Such an approach guarantees memory, without sacrificing the present or future.
    • Irena Klepfisz "Khaloymes/Dreams in Progress: Culture, Politics, and Jewish Identity" in Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches and Diatribes (1990)

L

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  • In my readings of the works on the Holocaust by scholars in the humanities and social sciences, I was quite perplexed to find that of the volumes I perused, few mention-and barely at that-the genocide undertaken by the Nazis against the Jewish populations in Italy, the Dodecanese Islands, Greece, and Tunisia and Libya. I was even more surprised to learn that very few Jewish historians and scholars were aware that the Holocaust affected the Sephardic communities. It is almost as if these Sephardim, who regard themselves as God's Chosen, did not belong to the Jewish nation.
    • Isaac Jack Levy And the World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust (1989) Preface
  • The Holocaust is not only the story of the ultimate tragedy that befell the Jewish people but a testimony to the cruelty of humankind, to a horrifying world in which everything went awry, in which religion, morality, and individual and social ethics lost their meaning. Because of excessive preoccupation with themselves and their immediate circle, human beings rejected their own rationality and pragmatism, creating their own fantasies and prejudices which ultimately warped their personal and social behavior. This state of mind, prevalent in Nazi Germany, gave rise to the Holocaust. And unless human frustrations are dealt with on the personal, family, and social levels, and problems resolved, the tragic events of the 1940s in Europe will continue to weigh heavily on all people. (p 47)
    • Isaac Jack Levy And the World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust (University of Illinois Press, 1989)
  • In the early 1990s, when serving as a consultant to the team planning the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I attended a meeting of the Content Committee, the group of laypeople who reviewed the plans for the museum's permanent exhibition. It promised to be a spirited gathering. At issue was the question of displaying hair that the Germans had "harvested" from Jewish women at Auschwitz and sold to factories that produced blankets and water-absorbent socks for U-boat crews. When the Soviets liberated the camps, they found storehouses filled with hair. The Auschwitz Museum had given the USHMM a number of kilos of it. The museum designers planned to display it near a pile of victims' shoes, which also came from the camps. When the plan was first proposed, some staff members objected, arguing that it degraded and objectified the women. Although it was appropriate to display hair at Auschwitz, they did not think it should be displayed a continent away from there. Some feared that teenagers would find it, given the particular world that this age cohort often inhabits, ghoulishly amusing. Their opposition notwithstanding, the committee voted nine to four to display it. Then a number of survivors grew wary and asked that the matter be reconsidered; hence this meeting. The project director had come equipped with scholarly, psychological, and even rabbinic arguments to counter the opponents. Scholars, including one of the most eminent Holocaust historians—committee member Raul Hilberg—argued that the hair should be displayed because it demonstrated the Final Solution's "ultimate rationality." The Germans considered a body part something to be transformed into an "industrial object" and a salable commodity. Psychologists believed that the display of the hair would be no more disconcerting than many other aspects of the exhibit. Leading Orthodox rabbis determined that displaying it did not constitute a nivul hamet, desecration of the dead, and transgressed no religious rulings. In an attempt to allay some of the objections, the designers proposed that a wall be built in front of the exhibit case. Visitors would have to choose to see the display and not just happen upon it.
  • I'd become as hard-hearted as the deportees who saw us arrive at Birkenau without saying a single comforting word. Surviving makes other people's tears unbearable. You might drown in them.

M

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O

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  • I think many non-Jews don't realise the tremendous emotional heat that is involved here in the second half of the twentieth century. A heat that derives from the Holocaust. That is to say the destruction, the mass murder of the Jews in Eastern Europe where most of the Jews were. That both the Israelis and the Jews of the United States are the bereaved children of that population who were murdered. And the bond between the Jews of the United States and the people of Israel has the emotional intensity derived from that common bereavement. And that is what gives. I do understand that people resent the power of the pro-Israel lobby in this country [the US], but that power derives from that elemental basic bond of the common bereavement and the horror that is there in the background. Therefore, Jews in the United States do react strongly – and that's what makes this a very powerful lobby, and it is – they do react strongly to anything that seems to them to threaten the connection of the United States in Israel, which is Israel's lifeline. They see this as threatening. This may be an exaggerated fear, but always there is the shadow there of a possible new Holocaust. Israel overrun. The people of Israel massacred again.

P

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  • Like it or not, the [Holocaust] must and will dominate future events. Its centrality in the creative endeavors of our contemporaries remains undisputed. Philosophers and social scientists, psychologists and moralists, theologians and artists: all have termed it a watershed in the annals of mankind. What was comprehensible before Treblinka is comprehensible no longer. After Treblinka, man's ability to cope with his condition was shattered; he was pushed to his limits and beyond. Whatever has happened since must therefore be judged in the light of Treblinka. Forgetfulness is no solution.
  • The most vital lesson to be drawn from the Holocaust era is that Auschwitz was possible because the enemy of the Jewish people and of mankind — and it is always the same enemy — succeeded in dividing, in separating, in splitting human society, nation against nation, Christian against Jew, young against old. And not enough people cared. In Germany and other occupied countries, most spectators chose not to interfere with the killers; in other lands, too, many persons chose to remain neutral. As a result, the killers killed, the victims died, and the world remained world.

R

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  • Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people.
    • Ayn Rand, as quoted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966).
  • Saidel, Hedgepeth and others who share their passion know they face obstacles in bringing attention to sexual assaults during the Holocaust.
    They say some people believe that focusing on gender-specific experiences takes away from the overall human and Jewish experience. Others have suggested that sexual violence against Jews wasn't a real issue because racial purity laws prohibited intercourse between Germans and Jews. And then there are those, they say, who are uncomfortable accepting testimonies as proof of occurrences.
    But Saidel wants to know this: If historians are willing to look at how the Holocaust experience differed from country to country and camp to camp, why shouldn't they also examine how experiences differed between men and women?
    As for the argument that racial purity laws protected Jewish women, she says, "That's absurd. That's like saying there are laws against rape so people don't get raped."
  • When Europeans put millions of their brothers (Jews) into ovens under the Nazis, the chickens were coming home to roost. Such behavior inside of "democratic" Europe was not as strange as it is sometimes made out to be. There was always a contradiction between the elaboration of democratic ideas inside Europe and the elaboration of authoritarian and thuggish practices by Europeans with respect to Africans.

S

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  • The final version of the Final Solution was not designed, as were Stalin’s improvisations, to protect the leader or his system. It was not a step in a logical plan so much as an element in an aesthetic vision. The original justifications for the killing of Jews gave way to the anti-Semitic incantation, always present, of a cosmic Jewish plot, the struggle against which was the very definition of German virtue. For Stalin, the political struggle always had political meaning. His achievement in that respect was nearly the opposite of Hitler’s: whereas Hitler transformed a republic into a revolutionary colonial empire, Stalin translated the poetics of revolutionary Marxism into durable workaday politics. Stalin’s class conflict could always be expressed in public as the Soviet line; the chain that bound Soviet citizens and foreign communists to his person was a logical one. For Hitler struggle itself was the good, and a struggle that destroyed the Jews was to be welcomed. If the Germans were defeated, then that was their fault.

W

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  • How is one to speak of such things and not lose one’s mind, and not beat one’s fists against the wall? It is as impossible to speak of them as not to speak of them. Too many corpses loom on our horizon; they weigh on every one of our words, their empty eyes hold us in check. One would have to invent a new vocabulary, a new language to say what no human being has ever said.
    • Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today. New York: Random House, (1978), p. 236; as quoted by Natan P.F. Kellermann in The Long-term Psychological Effects and Treatment of Holocaust Trauma, p. 5.
  • What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life — that is what is abnormal.
    • Elie Wiesel, After being asked "What does it take to be normal again, after having your humanity stripped away by the Nazis?" in an interview in O : The Oprah Magazine (November 2000).

Y

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  • At the time of the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust survivors made up approximately one quarter of the population of Israel and were viewed as immigrants who had arrived in the country at the time of its establishment. The Holocaust was referred as a tragic, brutal chapter in the history of European Jewry. But the eye witness accounts heard in the Jerusalem courtroom, transformed the public perception of the survivor community.
    • Yablonka, Hanna and Moshe Tlamim; "The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel: The Nuremberg, Kapos, Kastner and Eichmann Trials", in "Israel and the Holocaust", Spec. issue of Israel Studies 8.3 (Fall, 2003): 1-23; as quoted in "From Terrorist to Tzadik: Reading Comic Books as Post-Shoah Literature in Light of Magneto's Jewish Backstory", by Nicholaus Pumphrey in Ages of the X-Men: Essays on the Children of the Atom in Changing Times, ed. Joseph J. Darowski, p. 104.

See also

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