The Holocaust:
Famous Quotations

The Holocaust: Table of Contents | Introductory History | Jewish Persecution

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Mordechai Tenenbaum (Ghetto Resistance Fighter)

"The force that has overcome Europe and destroyed entire states within days could cope with us, a handful of youngsters. It was an act of desperation . . . We aspired to only one thing: to sell our lives for the highest possible price."

Resistance fighter in Vilna, Warsaw, and Bialystok

David Ben-Gurion (Israeli Prime Minister)

"We must assist the British in the war as if there were no White Paper and we must resist the White Paper as if there were no war."

September 1939

"What have you done to us, you freedom-loving peoples, guardians of justice, defenders of the high principles of democracy and of the brotherhood of man? What have you allowed to be perpetrated against a defenseless people while you stood aside and let it bleed to death, without offering help or succour, without calling on the fiends to stop, in the language of retribution which alone they would understand. Why do you profane our pain and wrath with empty expressions of sympathy which ring like a mockery in the ears of millions of the damned in the torture house of Nazi Europe? Why have you not even supplied arms to our ghetto rebels, as you have done for the partisans and underground fighters of other nations? Why did you not help us establish contacts with them, as you have done in the case of the partisans in Greece and Yugoslavia and the underground movements elsewhere? If, instead of Jews, thousands of English, American or Russian women, children and aged had been tortured every day, burnt to death, asphyxiated in gas chambers-would you have acted in the same way?"

September 1944

Elie Wiesel (Holocaust Survivor; Nobel Laureate)

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1986

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

Night, p. 32

"Around us, everyone was weeping. Someone began to recite the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I do not know if it has ever happened before, in the long history of the Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves."

Night, p. 31

Anne Frank (Diarist; Holocaust victim)

"That's the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered. It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet, I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

Diary of a Young Girl

Emmanuel Celler (U.S. Congressman)

"?If 6,000,000 cattle had been slaughtered, there would have been more interest. A way would have been found."

Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust, p. 16.

Heinrich Heine (German Poet)

"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."

Almansor: A Tragedy (1823), p. 142

Hannah Senesh (Jewish Poet; Resistance Fighter)

"Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame. Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart. Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor's sake. Blessed is the match consumes in kindling flame. "

Sardice, Yugoslavia, May 2, 1944

Chaim Weizmann (Israeli President)

"Now in the light of past and present events the bitter truth must be spoken. We feared too little and we hoped too much. We underestimated the bestiality of the enemy; we overestimtaed the humanity, the wisdom, the sense of justice of our friends."

Address to 22nd Zionist Congress, December 1946

Raul Hilberg (Holocaust Historian & Scholar)

"The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The German Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live."

The Destruction of the European Jews, p.9

Yehuda Bauer (Israeli Professor)

"I come from a people who gave the Ten Commandments to the world. Time has come to strenghten them by three additional ones, which we ought to adopt and commit ourselves to: thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander."

Speech to the German Bundestag, January 27, 1998

Martin Niemoeller (German Theologian; Pastor)

"First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."

1946

Abraham Joshua Heschel (Jewish Theologian; Rabbi)

"There is no answer to Auschwitz...To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God?s radiance in the jungles of history."

Quoted in Israel: An Echo of Eternity

The Holocaust: Famous Quotations