quotations about the Holocaust
Traditional antisemites had at most strived to remove the Jews from their country. Never before had they invaded foreign and remote countries and either killed the Jews there or deported them for the sole purpose of killing them. The Nazis had certainly started by persecuting the Jews in Germany. But the Holocaust was a fundamentally different affair. Its real meaning and its uniqueness cannot be grasped fully unless it is taken into account that, in the end, of all the Jews murdered, approximately 98 percent were not German Jews. That is what was unprecedented, what requires an explanation.
EBERHARD JÄCKEL
The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined
Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Lullaby
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it--the quality of temptation.
HANNAH ARENDT
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
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.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Modernity and the Holocaust
For me the Holocaust was not only a Jewish tragedy, but also a human tragedy. After the war, when I saw that the Jews were talking only about the tragedy of six million Jews, I sent letters to the Jewish organizations asking them to talk also about the millions of others who were persecuted with us together--many of them only because they helped Jews.
SIMON WIESENTHAL
The Wiesenthal File
Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason alone do we have to suffer now.
ANNE FRANK
The Diary of Anne Frank
Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers, the prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children. Jewish children, a beautiful little girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tenderness has never left me. Look and listen as they walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger.
ELIE WIESEL
address given at Auschwitz on the 50th anniversary of the Holocaust, January 1995
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.
PAT CONDELL
"Is Satan a Catholic?", March 27, 2010
I can guarantee you this, the days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over! We are no longer scattered among the nations, powerless to defend ourselves. We restored our sovereignty in our ancient home. And the soldiers who defend our home have boundless courage. For the first time in 100 generations, we, the Jewish people, can defend ourselves.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU
address to a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, March 3, 2015