Top 100 Auschwitz's Quotes
#1. I am persuaded that normal human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed toward a goal and that idleness, or aimless work (like Auschwitz's Arbeit), gives rise to suffering and to atrophy.
Primo Levi
#4. The prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days - after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide.
Viktor E. Frankl
#5. Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.
Edward Bond
#6. What I've learned about comedy people is that they're defined by the harshest level they've been to, their personal Auschwitz.
Bob Saget
#7. Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.
Primo Levi
#8. Almost 20 percent of the people living in Germany today have a foreign background. The problem is that Germany can't really offer foreigners an identity because the Germans hardly have a national identity themselves. That is certainly a result of Auschwitz.
Bassam Tibi
#9. The Germans are not a race of psychopaths, Alma. They're normal people like you and me, but with fanaticism, power, and impunity, anyone can turn into a monster, like the SS at Auschwitz, he told his sister.
Isabel Allende
#10. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz.
Primo Levi
#11. The Auschwitz praxis was based on a new principle: for one portion of mankind, existence itself is a crime, punishable by humiliation, torture, and death. And the new world produced by this praxis included two kinds of inhabitants, those who were given the "punishment" and those who administered it.
Emil Fackenheim
#12. Satirists, be careful. In the 1931 film by Rene Clair "Vive la Liberte" a song says, "Work is freedom." In 1940 the sign on the gates to Auschwitz said: "Arbeit macht frei.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
#13. Auschwitz was a much safer place to be than Dresden or any other city of any size in Germany from 1943 onward.
Michael Hoffman
#14. Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War - thousands of them in Auschwitz - we're again preparing the mass killing of this minority.
Antonio Tabucchi
#15. At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge-many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.
Elie Wiesel
#16. Thomas Merton writes that if we have meditated on the events of the Passion but have not meditated on Dachau and Auschwitz, our perception of God at work in present times is incomplete.
Richard J. Foster
#17. Today, I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.
Primo Levi
#18. The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz.
Nick Cohen
#19. Considerably more Polish Jews resident in France were killed than French Jews resident in France. Statelessness followed these thirty thousands murdered Polish Jews to Paris, to Drancy, to Auschwitz, to the gas chambers, to the crematoria, and to oblivion.
Timothy Snyder
#20. I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are 'among the most unspeakable crimes in history.' I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.
Noam Chomsky
#21. We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
George Steiner
#22. None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history.
Hannah Arendt
#23. All women are strong. My mother survived Auschwitz, and fear wasn't an option when we were growing up. If we were afraid of the dark, we were put into the closet until we weren't.
Diane Von Furstenberg
#24. I release Josef, who collapses to my feet, and confesses not just to all war crimes at Auschwitz but also for being responsible for the colossal mistakes New Coke and Sex and the City 2.
Jodi Picoult
#25. Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
Gunter Grass
#26. During the first 3 years at Auschwitz, 2 million people died; over the next 2 years - 3 million.
Witold Pilecki
#27. Look at the Germans, the most cultured and well mannered of people, and yet ... Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen. Given the same set of circumstances it could just as well have been the English,
Kate Atkinson
#28. I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.
David Sedaris
#29. Michel and Annette Muller's mother, snatched from her children at Beaune-la-Rolande, died at Auschwitz. And while it was the Nazis who wished her dead, it was the French who put her in harm's way.
Laurence Rees
#30. During the Nuremberg trials, Oswald Pohl, an SS Lieutenant General, ... is shown here explaining how Farben operated such concentration camps as Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
G. Edward Griffin
#33. Auschwitz was attacked and recovered by the Russian forces on January 27th, 1945. A very short time before that date Buchenwald had been reconquered. Buchenwald was the first concentration camp to be opened and exposed to the public eye.
Javier Gomez Perez
#34. Psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor, Viktor Frankl, stated, ... man is by no means merely a product of heredity and environment. There is a third element: decision. Man ultimately decides for himself!
Alice A. Kemp
#35. There had been over four thousand Jewish children penned in the Vel' d'Hiv', aged between two and twelve. Most of the children were French, born in France. None of them came back from Auschwitz.
Tatiana De Rosnay
#36. You'll never get a boyfriend if you look like you wandered out of Auschwitz.
Helen Fielding
#38. Fascism is not [only] squads of the SA or the Blackshirts marching on the streets. Fascism is officials, in uniforms ordering what is capitalist supposed to do with "his" factory, and how he should father "his" children and occasionally - how many Jews (or anti-Semites) should be sent to Auschwitz.
Janusz Korwin-Mikke
#39. I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating, but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us. Perhaps we shall have to colonise the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there.
R. J. Hollingdale
#40. It was like giving a Jewish kid a coffee-table book about Auschwitz.
Nell Zink
#41. You will remember this number. you will memorize it. you will answer when it is called. you have no name any longer. just a number. any prisoner who forgets his number or doesn't respond when his number is called will be shot. do you understand?
Joel C. Rosenberg
#42. The thing about World War II is that everyone knows about the concentration camps in Europe - in Nazi Germany and Poland and Auschwitz and the other camps - but, no one really talks about the camps that were here in the United States.
Lea Salonga
#43. No" - I could never be another person's father, fate, god,
"No" - it should never happen to another child, what happened to me; my childhood. (Auschwitz).
Imre Kertesz
#44. The dead of Auschwitz should have brought upon us a total transformation; nothing should have been allowed to remain as it was, neither among our people nor in our churches. Above all, not in the churches.
Johann Baptist Metz
#45. In the preceding pages, to paraphrase the words of Auschwitz survivor, writer, and Nobel Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, we share Martin Small's personal journey not so that you will understand but so that you will know you can never understand.
Martin Small
#46. The sad and horrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being murdered ... This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust and this is the lesson which Auschwitz taught us.
Ariel Sharon
#47. The world must never know the things we do here,colonel. Never. Do i make myself clear?
Joel C. Rosenberg
#48. I come from a very religious background.And actually I remained in it. All my anger I describe in my quarrels with God in Auschwitz, but you know I used to pray every day.
Elie Wiesel
#49. It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.
Theodor W. Adorno
#50. Some fifteen percent of the 6,500 staff members working at Auschwitz would eventually be convicted of war crimes, with the government of Poland being among the most active in investigating and prosecuting war criminals.
Larry Berg
#51. Auschwitz cries out with the pain of immense suffering and pleads for a future of respect, peace and encounter among peoples.
Pope Francis
#52. He follows a man with a rolled up mattress strapped to his back. When he stepped down from the train into the brutalising glare of the searchlights in the marshalling yard he noticed two SS soldiers pointing at this man and laughing.
Glenn Haybittle
#53. The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.
Ian Kershaw
#54. People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.
Newt Gingrich
#55. I'm not alive. People believe memories grow vague, are erased by time, since nothing endures against the passage of time. That's the difference; time does not pass over me, over us. It doesn't erase anything, doesn't undo it. I'm not a live. I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it.
Charlotte Delbo
#56. Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz.
Ken Livingstone
#57. So many times I wanted to go to Auschwitz, but I couldn't take up the courage to go there.
Frank Lowy
#58. There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
Primo Levi
#59. Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.
Billy Graham
#60. Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.
Theodor Adorno
#61. I know that elections must be limited only to those who understand that the Arabs are the deadly enemy of the Jewish state, who would bring on us a slow Auschwitz - not with gas, but with knives and hatchets.
Meir Kahane
#62. The dismembering of a human being routinely in 30 minutes on an outpatient bases - or any other way - is barbaric. Four blocks from our church all year long - like churches within smelling distance of Auschwitz or Dachau or Buchenwald.
John Piper
#63. The word "Auschwitz" has become a metonym for the Holocaust as a whole. Yet the vast majority of Jews had already been murdered, further east, by the time that Auschwitz became a major killing facility. Yet while Auschwitz has been remembered, most of the Holocaust has been largely forgotten.
Timothy Snyder
#64. Yet what choice did he have? Nothing about this war was fair. Nothing about being Jewish was fair, The only question that counted was whether he wanted to live or not, and he did.
Joel C. Rosenberg
#65. The sincere Christian knows that what died in Auschwitz was not the Jewish people but Christianity.
Elie Wiesel
#67. No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.
Art Spiegelman
#68. Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.
Edward Bond
#69. It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft in the void of bottomless despair, both during the journey and after. It was not the will to live, nor a conscious resignation; for few are the men capable of such resolution, and we were but a common sample of humanity.
Primo Levi
#70. Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.
Viktor E. Frankl
#71. I don't think I could ever go to Auschwitz, because when we took that tour of MGM, I nearly collapsed outside the Thalberg building.
Charles Busch
#72. There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz.
Romain Gary
#73. Ask most kids about details about Auschwitz or about how the American Indians were assassinated as a people and they don't know anything about it. They don't want to know anything. Most people just want their beer or their soap opera or their lullaby.
Marlon Brando
#74. Small streams of hatred can quickly lead to unstoppable, horrific things, so [people] should stand up to any type of persecution or discrimination, whether bullying or malicious gossip.
Susan Pollack
#75. I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through! I guess it's some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.
Art Spiegelman
#76. ...an when we got there, O my brothers and chiefs, we saw what it said: OSVETIM, Auschwitz, an it was too late for us to turn back, no matter how badly we wanted to...
Jachym Topol
#77. Auschwitz?! That is a name I had heard before. There is not much time for thinking. It had been raining here not so long ago. The asphalt of the wet, wide platform reflects the light of the high lighting-poles. The row of armed SS men competes in howling with their dogs they hold on leashes
Azriel Feuerstein
#78. Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.
Theodor W. Adorno
#79. The question shouldn't be "Why are you, a Christian, here in a death camp, condemned for trying to save Jews?' The real question is "Why aren't all the Christians here?
Joel C. Rosenberg
#80. Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay.
Tom Lantos
#81. I remember those faces of people who were good I saw that. I saw a father who gave his bread to his son and his son gave back the bread to his father. That, to me, was such a defeat of the enemies, will of the enemies, theories of the enemies, aspirations, here [in Auschwitz].
Elie Wiesel
#82. I work all the time; whatever I do, I do it, and I don't necessarily look at it as work. You could say the Auschwitz project was work, or the Lowy Institute is work, or Westfield is work, or the football is work. It is life.
Frank Lowy
#83. Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
W. H. Auden
#84. There is no German identity without Auschwitz,
Joachim Gauck
#85. We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright.
Viktor E. Frankl
#86. We cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and - to our benefit! - has made possible an insight that could be summarized as, 'Now we finally know ourselves.'
Gunter Grass
#87. I've worked with five Presidents in America, all of them I ask the same question always: Why didn't the American allies bomb the railways going to Auschwitz?
Elie Wiesel
#88. Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution and deflection of the forces of nature. What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, an Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.
Erwin Chargaff
#89. Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.
Elie Wiesel
#90. The Holocaust may belong to history, but it was the price we paid to become a nation. Auschwitz was like a cradle of death that enabled future generations of Israelis to live.
Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof
#91. Every nuclear bomb is an Auschwitz waiting to happen.
Patricia Marx
#92. I prefer a powerful and proud Jewish State that is hated by the entire world than an Auschwitz that is loved by one and all
Meir Kahane
#93. Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being
whoever he or she may be
is no longer revered as an inviolable mystery.
Karen Armstrong
#94. I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
David Irving
#95. For me, one of the most interesting columns to write was about Dick Cheney when he represented the U.S. at a commemorative ceremony at Auschwitz.
Robin Givhan
#96. Eighteen months before I was born, my mother was in Auschwitz. She weighed 49 pounds. She always told me that God saved her so she could give me life. I was born out of nothing.
Diane Von Furstenberg
#97. I was 15, not 14, when I was inside there [Auschwitz], 15, and for me both were actually a surprise.
Elie Wiesel
#98. 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.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#100. Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Viktor E. Frankl
